The crackdown on miners in China has yielded results. The computing power on the bitcoin network has plummeted to its lowest levels since the end of last year.
BTC hashrate descended to 129.1 exhashes per second (EH / s) on Thursday. The last time this indicator was at this level was at the beginning of December 2020, according to data from the Blockchain.com service.
Note that in mid-May, the computing power in the network reached 180 EH/s.
The drop in miner activity was the result of pressure from the authorities of several Chinese provinces. First, the province of Xinjiang banned the mining of cryptocurrency on its territory. Then, officials from Inner Mongolia, Yunnan, and Qinghai provinces made similar statements.
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Mining bullets began to stop their equipment, which led to the collapse of the hash rate. Only one of the Chinese pools, 1Thash, lost 70% of its capacity in a week.
Experts believe that the drop in hash rate is temporary, as miners are already moving to other countries where they can work more freely. Compass Mining's Zach Voell predicts that the computing power in the bitcoin network will start to grow again shortly.
He noted: "After the equipment moves to new regions, bitcoin's hashrate increase should resume."