Blackout in China’s Xinjiang province on April 15th, caused a sharp drop in the hashrate power of the bitcoin network. The drop reached very large percentages after the power record that had been recorded and had reached 218 exahash per second.

 

“Bitcoin mining pool hashrate fell within 24 hours. Antpool power fell by 24.5%, Btc.com fell by 18.9%, Poolin fell by 33%, Binance fell by 20%. The reason is that Northwest China is completely suspended for security inspections”.

 

One of the founders of Primitive Crypto, Dovey Wan, talked about shutting down the next day.

 

“Xinjiang is facing a major power shortage due to a coal mine explosion. Bitcoin hashrate has fallen by almost 30% immediately. It is likely to recover in about a week. All data centres have closed as well.”

 

“Xinjiang and Sichuan together have more than 50% of the total Bitcoin hashrate. We hope to have more distributed hashrate in the future for reasons of flexibility.”

 

Co-founder of blockchain Coinmetrics.io data collection platform Nic Carter also commented on Twitter about the situation in China and the fall of hashrate.

 

The network in Xinjiang is falling apart and its effects on hashrate are what economists call a “natural experiment”, a very useful data source. Xinjiang relies heavily on carbon but not exclusively. There are huge amounts of wind and solar energy – 35 % renewable from 2019.

 

Carter added that next week, the drop could indicate how much hashrate is installed in the area.

 

“Based on next week’s data, we will be able to make an estimate of Xinjiang’s share of the bitcoin network (assuming we know for sure that the whole grid is down – difficult to say based on few reports we have).”

 

Popular commentator Willy Woo shows us the relationship between the decline in mining power and the fall in the price of bitcoin, while reminding us of what happened in 2017 respectively.