Bitcoin endured a hit on Thursday after the web in Kazakhstan was closed down in the midst of increasing brutality. The Asian country as of late has been shaken by savage conflicts between dissenters, police, and the military.
The fights started in the west of the country throughout the end of the week, after a sharp ascent in fuel prices, and immediately spread through urban areas the country over.
The web was closed down across the country on Wednesday. The whole plan was to disrupt the protestor’s communication system. This will ensure that large riots cannot be organized and information to spread on social media. While the strategy seems fair, its effect backfired.
Over the last year, Kazakhstan has been important to the bitcoin community. When China decided to put a stop to most of the internal crypto activities last year, miners were searching for a new home.
Kazakhstan came up as a viable place due to the favorable energy prices. It worked out well for the miners initially and led the country to rank second for bitcoin mining, falling short behind the United States.
During the initial hours of the blackout, it sends a ripple effect through the bitcoin ecosystem as the computation power fell.
Bitcoin is mined by powerful PCs that seek to solve complex puzzles to verify transactions on the blockchain network. This process was once done on a single PC in 2009 but became energy-intensive and difficult as the years go by. Hence, miners were forced to set up large distributed systems of PCs to solve more problems at a faster rate so as to be rewarded with more money.
This outage led to reducing in the hash rate as well which is basically the speed of mining. The hash rate was down 15% between Tuesday and Thursday according to BTC.com.
