Is BTC currently walking a tightrope along its cost line? The price keeps getting pulled back and forth around $90,000, while electricity bills are soaring—miners truly can’t hold on anymore. But interestingly, a top Wall Street investment bank is now calling for a long-term target of $170,000.

Let’s start with the current dilemma. That investment bank recently lowered its estimated BTC production cost from $94K to $90K. Sounds like a decrease? In reality, the coin price has been lingering below this line. You know how mining works—electricity costs are the major expense. When revenue no longer covers costs, miners either shut down or sell coins to survive.

Network hash rate has been dropping recently—a crucial signal. Part of the reason is indeed a certain country reiterating its mining ban (you know which one), but the broader logic is: depressed coin prices + soaring electricity costs = profits getting squeezed out. Those miners using expensive electricity are now marginal producers, losing money on every coin they mine.

But the other side of the story is even more dramatic. The same investment bank, in another report, analyzed BTC’s volatility-adjusted valuation relative to gold and concluded that it’s severely undervalued. According to their model, the long-term fair value should be close to $170,000—almost double the current price.

Is this contradictory? On the surface, yes. On one hand, miners can’t hold on and are about to capitulate; on the other, the long-term value is $170K. But if you think deeper, it makes sense: short-term is about the supply side (miner costs), long-term is about the demand side (institutional allocation logic). This is a classic “miner capitulation moment”—high-cost capacity gets flushed out, cheaper electricity and new equipment come in, and the cost curve gets rebuilt.

The decline in hash rate isn’t all bad either. The difficulty adjustment mechanism will make mining profitable again, and the miners who survive will enjoy a larger share of block rewards. This is the self-healing ability of a decentralized network—inefficient capacity is weeded out through market forces.

So the current situation is delicate: miners are bleeding, but institutions are positioning. $90K is cost support, $170K is the upside potential. The gap in between? It all depends on whose narratives can last the longest.