What if a public Bitcoin miner defaults on its debt?
An indebted public miner defaulting on convertibles dumps treasury BTC and triggers a mining-sector equity selloff (MARA/RIOT/CLSK), with MSTR (-5.1%) the levered-proxy casualty. Rhymes with the 2022 Core Scientific bankruptcy and convertible-note distress across miners. Forward angle: miners loaded convertibles again to fund AI/HPC pivots, so default risk is now tied to AI-buildout execution, not just BTC price — a new cross-dependency.
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 0–6 months 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. A heavily indebted public Bitcoin miner defaults on convertible notes, dumping treasury BTC and triggering a mining-sector selloff. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Bitcoin ▼ · Crypto confidence ▼ · Crypto liquidity ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.