Sazmining's Kent Halliburton Says Bitcoin's First-Ever Hash Rate Bear Market Is the Best Mining Entry Point in History

Sazmining CEO and co-founder Kent Halliburton joined Simply Bitcoin to lay out an article he has been developing on the show for weeks: Bitcoin mining, he argues, is living through its first-ever hash rate bear market, and that decline is creating the best entry point miners have ever seen.

THE HEADLINE CLAIM

Halliburton's article, published on Sazmining's site, carries the headline that Bitcoin's first hash rate bear market is setting up the best mining entry the industry will ever see. He told Opti he stands behind the claim because, across roughly 16 years of Bitcoin mining history, the network has never before gone through a sustained decline in hash rate the way it has over the past several months.

WHY HASH RATE IS FALLING

Halliburton's explanation centers on competition for powered land. As AI compute demand has surged, operators have been unplugging Bitcoin mining machines to free up power and space for AI infrastructure instead. That has cut demand for new mining rigs, and Halliburton said pricing on ASIC hardware has fallen to the point where he believes manufacturers have had to shut down production lines to stay afloat, with some trying to get their unsold inventory hosted at other facilities just to generate some return on it. Halliburton estimated on the show that hash rate growth, which he said ran at roughly two and a half percent a month over the last five years before the downturn, has slowed to something closer to half a percent a month now, even as he expects Bitcoin's price to keep climbing at a faster monthly clip. That gap between a slow-growing hash rate and a rising price is the arbitrage he is calling the golden pocket, and he estimated the window could last as long as eighteen months.

WHY HE THINKS THE AI PIVOT IS A MISTAKE

Halliburton was blunt about publicly traded miners that have shifted their infrastructure toward AI hosting. Asked directly whether he thought some of these companies were making a mistake, he said plainly that he does, and argued the pressure to pivot came less from the mining companies themselves and more from investors chasing a faster return in dollar terms. He broke down the economics behind that pivot: setting up one megawatt of Bitcoin mining capacity costs roughly a million dollars, he said, compared to fifteen to twenty million dollars for one megawatt of AI infrastructure. Because that gap in capital intensity is so large, he described the shift as a one-way door. A miner can add Bitcoin mining onto existing powered land relatively cheaply, but a company that has already sunk fifteen million dollars into an AI data center is not going to unwind that investment to go back to mining.

THE BET ON AN AI OVERSHOOT

Halliburton said he expects the broader AI data center buildout to eventually overshoot, arguing that as AI compute becomes more efficient, more of that workload will move to edge devices rather than centralized data centers. He compared the pattern to past infrastructure booms, including railroads and fiber optic cable, that also drew heavy investor enthusiasm before working through a period of oversupply. That view has real stakes attached to it beyond one company's thesis. Halliburton noted that some of the largest publicly traded Bitcoin mining companies have already stopped mining Bitcoin altogether in favor of AI hosting, and once that hash rate infrastructure converts, he does not expect it to convert back.

WHAT IT MEANS FOR MINERS TODAY

The practical takeaway from Halliburton's thesis is straightforward: miners who can lock in current, depressed equipment and power costs get to produce Bitcoin at a fixed cost while the market price around them rises, a different experience than buying on the secondary market and being fully exposed to Bitcoin's price swings. He also said the shift toward private mining operators, away from the public miners now chasing AI, means less forced selling from miners during the next downturn, since private buyers are more likely to be there to accumulate Bitcoin rather than convert it straight to cash.

This story comes from the Simply Bitcoin Live show. Watch the full episode.