Bitcoin is in a bear market. That much is not in dispute.
What Jim Ferraioli, Director of Digital Currencies Research and Strategy at Charles Schwab, argued Wednesday on Bloomberg is more precise and more structural: this selloff has a measurable cost floor, and that floor is built not from sentiment or chart patterns, but from the physics of energy consumption.
The numbers frame the drawdown in context. Bitcoin peaked at $126,000 in the fall before collapsing to roughly $60,000 in February — a 50% correction that, while brutal for recent buyers, falls far short of the 75%-plus implosions that defined prior Bitcoin bear markets.
Ferraioli’s core analytical framework centers on one question: what does it cost to manufacture Bitcoin? The answer creates a natural gravitational floor that has held across multiple cycles.
For the most efficient miners — those operating at scale with next-generation ASIC hardware and access to the cheapest wholesale energy — the cost to produce one Bitcoin sits at approximately $60,000, Ferraioli said.
