China’s strict crackdown on cryptocurrency put several Chinese Bitcoin (BTC) miners out of business, and their departure from the industry led to falling hash rates. However, since the miners started operations in other countries like the U.S. and Canada, the hash rate has gone up by 21.38%. The Chinese government recently ordered power stations across the country to suspend energy supply to BTC mining facilities, which crashed BTC’s hash rate. The hashing effectiveness, which is also the cumulative computing power of the BTC network, reduced to 84 Exahashes per second (EH/s) from an all-time high of 180 EH/s in 21 days. Although the network is gradually recovering, the bitcoin mining difficulty is expected to rise by 4% at the next adjustment. Though the statement on the crackdown clearly specifies that the instruction was only about BTC mining, the orders passed on affected ASIC miners securing the Ethereum network and mining farms used for storing graphic cards. ETH miners then began to dump their used GPUs on the secondhand market. Following the Chinese government’s ruling , miners began to look for countries with lower electricity costs and transparent regulations, even though there would be higher computational costs. However, since more Chinese miners are coming back online, the operational cost for BTC will keep increasing. Image Credits: Pixabay
