Bitcoin hash rate declined by over 25 percent as of August 18, following severe landslides caused by the torrential downpour in China’s Sichuan province. The heavy rains caused Sichuan province to spark off a level 1 response, the topmost in its four-tier emergency response levels.
Bitcoin mining activities seemed to be running smoothly after bitcoin successfully broke past the $12,000 level. Notably, the cheap electric power available in Sichuan province during the hydro-season and the price of BTC had triggered an average milestone hash rate of 129 EH/s beginning August 15.
Bitcoin hash rate drop to affect mining difficulty
Nevertheless, the latest developments in Sichuan province on top of the number of BTC miners based in the area, a decline in bitcoin hash rate is not a surprise. Consequently, the hash rate fell from 140 EH/s to 105 EH/s.
The largest mining pool saw a massive 20 percent decline from 20 EH/s to 16EH/s. Furthermore, F2Pool and the other top five Bitcoin mining pools also saw a drop within the range of 20-25 percent.
The drop in bitcoin hash rate will affect bitcoin’s mining difficulty, which was favorably corrected with a 0.59 percent rise. On average, mining difficulty adjustment has remained positive since June 16. Nevertheless, the decline in Bitcoin hash rate as a result of the torrential downpour might soon result in a negative difficulty adjustment.
The latest hash rate decline is the third significant drop throughout 2020, with the initial drop seen back in March when the cryptocurrency market dropped massively. The second decline happened during bitcoin’s block halving event.
BTC price overview
Bitcoin bulls successfully managed to push the price past the $12,000 price level after struggling for almost three weeks. Yesterday, BTC price surged from the lows of $11,800 before reaching its new high of $12,450. Although the cryptocurrency has retraced back to about $12,220 at press time, it finally managed to breach $12,000.
