Power outage in Kazakhstan causes bitcoin's global computing power to disappear by 12%

Mining in Kazakhstan has taken a hit as the country’s internet has been repeatedly shut down amid protests, Fortune reported on Jan. 8.

On January 5, local media in Kazakhstan reported that the country's electricity and internet were cut off. Subsequently, Bitcoin’s “hash rate” plummeted. A few hours after the outage, Larry Themack of The Block, a cryptocurrency consulting and research site, tweeted that Bitcoin’s global hashrate had lost 12%. There was a sudden and sharp drop in the business of several producers in Kazakhstan. AntPool, Poolin and Binance Pool’s hash rate dropped by 12% to 16%.

A drop in mining power in Kazakhstan has also led to a slump in bitcoin prices, which fell below $43,000 on Thursday, hitting a multi-month low.

Kazakhstan is a Bitcoin powerhouse. According to the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance (CCAF), in 2021 Kazakhstan is the world's second-largest center for bitcoin mining after the United States.

In October 2021, Kazakhstan announced that it will supply power to licensed existing bitcoin mining farms in accordance with quotas to prevent further power shortages and blackouts. New laws enacted in the country severely limit the amount of electricity that can be used by new bitcoin mining farms and set the total amount of electricity available to all new mining farms to an extremely low level.