A recovery in the price of bitcoin should fuel gains for mining companies that process transactions on the crypto's network. Yet the stocks face hurdles beyond the digital currency's price.

Bitcoin miners operate the computers that process transactions on the blockchain, receiving payment in bitcoin itself for their work. The process works through brute-force computing to solve a mathematical puzzle for each block of transactions. Miners consume vast amounts of electricity to try to win a block reward, competing against other miners around the world for each block.