How cutting power to Bitcoin miners can actually burn more energy

According to CryptoSlate, certain Bitcoin mining variable difficulty controllers can keep demanding work calibrated for a machine's former speed after a power cut. Mining engineer Eric Price and Bitcoin Optech highlighted that if a controller recalculates only upon receiving a share, a sharp slow-down makes the next share less likely. Without a fresh share to trigger an update, the controller can hold the wrong difficulty, leaving slowed machines hashing through a finite window with sparse accepted shares and consuming continuous electricity while receiving little or no pool-side credit.

The analysis concerns pool-assigned share difficulty rather than Bitcoin network difficulty. While high share difficulty does not automatically erase expected long-term credit, a pay-per-share miner receives no payment for intervals with no accepted share. The Stratum V2 reference implementation avoids permanent freezes using a timer, though ckpool was identified as a deployed share-triggered example. MARA Foundation released an open-source shape-proxy allowing operators to test whether a pool lowers difficulty after an apparent decline. Available sources have not measured how common the behavior is or whether it caused material real-world losses.