The Bitcoin Signal Most Investors Are Watching: Hash Ribbons Explain What’s Happening
Bitcoin is struggling to hold above the $90,000 level as uncertainty continues to dominate market sentiment. After some weeks of consolidation and failed recovery attempts, the price action reflects the delicate balance between cautious buyers and ongoing selling pressure. While traders focus on technical levels and major signals, an often overlooked part of the Bitcoin ecosystem is quietly sending important warnings: the behavior of miners.
Senior analyst Darkfost explains that mining comes with variable and incremental costs, including energy, hardware, and operational costs. When miners start working at a loss, they are usually left with two main options, often used in combination. The first is to sell BTC to cover expenses and stay active. The second is to reduce or close work by shutting down equipment, effectively reducing their exposure to unprofitable conditions.
At its core, Bitcoin mining consists of solving cryptographic problems using the power of aggregation. The network is designed in such a way that one block is mined approximately every 10 minutes. When block times drift up or down, the protocol automatically adjusts the mining difficulty every 2,016 blocks to restore balance. This adjustment, combined with the miners’ profit, is directly reflected in the network’s hashrate.
Currently, the hashrate is decreasing, which shows the increasing pressure on the entire mining sector. This suggests that miners are pulling back on performance, a trend that is often associated with market volatility and higher risk of selling Bitcoin.
Mine Pressure Decreases As Difficulty Decreases
Today, Bitcoin mining difficulties are starting to improve, giving the first signs of relief for a sector that has been under constant pressure. The latest correction shows a decline of about 2.6%, and current projections suggest that the next swing could be as low as 1.88%. While these figures may seem modest, they have significant implications for miners’ behavior and broader market dynamics.
The downward difficulty adjustment reduces the computational effort required to mine new blocks, effectively reducing the operational stress of miners. As a result, profit-making conditions improve at the margins, even if the value of Bitcoin remains limited.
This reduction in pressure helps stabilize the mining operation and, critically, reduces the urgency for miners to sell BTC just to cover operating costs. Historically, the times when pressure on miners starts to ease usually coincides with a decrease in sell-side pressure from this cluster.
These dynamics are consistently captured by the Hash Ribbons indicator, which tracks the short-term and long-term moving averages of a network’s hashrate to identify mining recovery phases and recovery phases. Darkfost notes that Hash Ribbons are still flashing a buy signal, indicating that the market is sitting in a post-capitulation zone where the selling pressure of miners has been largely absorbed.
However, this signal is now beginning to fade. As the crisis subsides and conditions return to normal, miners are likely to gradually return to full capacity. As the machines come back online, the hashrate should trend upwards, marking the exit of the stress phase and indicating that the window of relief operated by the miners may be narrow.
Price Action Remains Trapped Below Key Values
Bitcoin continues to trade in a wide range of consolidation after a sharp sell-off from the October highs, and the price is currently hovering around the $90,000–$92,000 range. The chart shows BTC trying to stabilize after regaining the red long-term moving average, but the upward momentum remains limited as the price is still embedded below the blue and green mid-term moving averages, which now act as dynamic resistance.
The recent bounce from the $85,000–$87,000 range suggests buyers are protecting this sought-after property, which has attracted multiple bids since late November. However, the structure is constantly adjusting instead of rushing. Each recovery attempt produced a lower high, indicating that traders are continuing to spread from strength. Volume also remains muted compared to the selling phase, reinforcing the idea that this move is a consolidation rather than a trend reversal.
From a structural perspective, Bitcoin is still stuck between strong resistance near $95,000–$98,000 and key support at $85,000. A decisive retracement of the 100-day and 200-day moving averages will be required to confirm the regime change. Until that happens, price action favors continued sideways movement or other tests of lower support.
Overall, the chart shows the balance of the market: sellers are still in full control, but buyers do not have the confidence necessary for Bitcoin to return to a continuous rise.
Featured image from ChatGPT, chart from TradingView.com
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