Multiple Chinese Bitcoin (BTC) mining pools were negatively affected when power in Northwest China went off without warning this week.
Significant drops in the hash rate of major pools were observed following the power outage, with Poolin plummeting by 33%, Antpool falling 25%, Binance Pool dropping 20%, and BTC.com plunging 19%.
Aside from these, there are still a number of BTC mining operations that experienced the same ill effect, reminding us that Bitcoin mining is directly relative and dependent on power consumption.
What Caused the Black Out?
In various news reports following the incident, it was revealed that a comprehensive power outage for safety inspection was experienced in the region of Xinjiang in China. This was done following a flooding accident in a coal mine in the area where 21 miners were trapped at three different locations.
Because Xinjiang is a major source of the global Bitcoin hash rate, the incident was unfortunate, and its effects were immediately felt.
The Cambridge Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index or BECI estimated that the region accounts for nearly 36% of the combined hashing power of China. Since the country represents two-thirds of total global mining power, it was believed that Xinjiang owns 23.3% of the global hash rate.
Overcoming the Negative Effects
The power outage in Northwest China may have cost Bitcoin miners a huge amount of money.
The outages seem to have made the Bitcoin network’s combined hash rate drop by 2.2% in the last 24 hours, from 169.4 million to 165.8 million terahashes per second (TH/s), as reflected in Ycharts.
Teams managing the affected mining pools can only hope that as the situation gets better and goes back to normal, the observed drop in hashing rate will be gone. With that, their operations should go back to how it was, along with their expected outputs.
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