Estimating Bitcoin production cost is a common concern for economists, financial engineers, environmental activists, investors, and regulators. The costs affect the robustness of the Bitcoin ecosystem, the sustainability of its energy consumption, and ultimately, the value of its assets. The existing estimation approach relies on estimating power consumption by analyzing the performance of mining hardware available in the market. This paper proposes a new approach to estimating Bitcoin production cost, based on a behavioral model of miners instead of analyzing energy costs by surveying mining hardware profiles. We apply a theoretical model that derives the rational hash rate from a miner’s risk tolerance to infer the production cost solely from changes in the Bitcoin price and the mining difficulty parameter. We present methods to generate a time series of estimated production costs using actual Bitcoin prices and difficulty parameters. The results show that the estimated production costs, using only Bitcoin prices and difficulty parameters, closely track the energy costs estimated from mining hardware profiles. This suggests that most miners behave rationally, as the model assumes, and that we have obtained an alternative method to estimate the cost of Bitcoin production.