Bitcoin miners are plotting a major career pivot, moving from speculative digging to becoming essential infrastructure players, according to Abundant Mines CEO Beau Turner.
In a chat with TheStreet Roundtable, Turner said major mining outfits are tweaking their playbooks as the industry digs deeper into the post-halving era. "The biggest players in the industry are in many cases shifting their business models away from just a primary self mining business," Turner noted.
The exec indicated that future mining ops will probably obsess over block space more than block rewards. "You are going to probably see miners feel more like critical infrastructure businesses," Turner stated. "We will be talking more about block space than block rewards."
As Bitcoin adoption balloons among governments, corporations, and financial institutions, the real estate on Bitcoin’s blockchain could turn into a hot commodity, Turner suggested. The CEO likened block space to strategic assets like metals or energy that nations scramble to lock down.
Turner projected that the professionalization of mining could smooth out the sector’s classic boom-and-bust volatility. "For the people who institutionalize and who professionalize, I think it is still going to be an incredibly lucrative industry for the next decade," Turner said.
The Bitcoin halving is a coded event that hits roughly every four years, slashing the block reward for miners by half. It pumps the brakes on new bitcoin creation and keeps the network’s hard cap of 21 million bitcoin intact.
The latest halving dropped in April 2024, trimming the block reward from 6.25 bitcoin to 3.125 bitcoin per block. The next one is penciled in for 2028, likely April, based on network block times. At that stage, the reward shrinks to 1.5625 bitcoin.
The halving is engineered to gradually nudge miner revenue from subsidy chases toward transaction fees, per Bitcoin’s core protocol design.
