Bitcoin’s hashrate dropped by more than 27% in 24 hours to 159.41 exahashes per second (EH/s) on Wednesday, the lowest since February this year, according to data from BTC.com.
See related article: Bitcoin miners in Texas halt operations amid heat wave
Fast facts
- Multiple crypto miners in Texas, a mining hub in the U.S., have stopped operations as the demand for power surges amid a searing heat wave.
- The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) is appealing to homes and businesses to limit peak-time consumption as temperatures surge above 100 degrees in most of the state’s major cities.
- Bitcoin’s mining difficulty, an indicator of how hard a miner would have to work to verify transactions in the blockchain to mine a Bitcoin, was at 29.153 trillion on Wednesday, falling 3.7% from a month earlier.
- The level of computing power used per second for mining, otherwise known as the mining hashrate, is linked to adjustments in crypto mining difficulty.
- This comes as Bitcoin hovers around the US$20,000 mark, trading up 3.4% over the past 24 hours to US$20,144.56 in afternoon trading in Asia, according to CoinGecko.
See related article: Will Mt. Gox Bitcoin eruption smother hopes of rapid crypto recovery?