What if a pre-halving hashrate grab crushes miner margins?
A pre-halving hashrate land-grab squeezes public miner margins first (MARA, RIOT, CLSK), with forced miner BTC sales capping spot and dragging MSTR as the levered proxy. Rhymes with the 2021 China hashrate ban and post-2024-halving margin compression, which crushed miner equities far more than BTC itself. Forward angle: rising AI-datacenter competition for power makes the energy-cost spike sharper than prior cycles.
Every number ships with its receipt — the odds, the range, the precedents, and a public grade at Reality Check. The statistical machinery that produces it is proprietary.
The butterfly cascade
How this trigger trickles across markets, left → right — the root shock, its first‑order moves, then the ripple effects. Drag any node; tap a market for its real price history.
Resolution timeline — how this probability is moving
Our model's odds (electric blue) over time vs the market's (Polymarket, amber), from the past toward the 1–3 years horizon. Each dot is a real macro event that nudged the probability — green pushed it up, red pushed it down. Tap a dot for the source. Loading the probability audit trail…
What it would mean
If this plays out, it is a mixed shock. Anticipation of the 2028 halving triggers a hashrate land-grab, spiking energy costs and squeezing public miner margins. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Bitcoin ▼ · Crypto confidence ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.