LONDON : The global computing power of the bitcoin network has dropped sharply as the shutdown this week of Kazakhstan's internet during a deadly uprising hit the country's fast-growing cryptocurrency mining industry.
The internet was on Wednesday shut down across the country in what monitoring site Netblocks called"a nation-scale internet blackout".Bitcoin and other cryptocurrenices are created or"mined" by high-powered computers, usually at data centres in different parts of the world, which compete to solve complex mathematical puzzles in a highly energy-intensive process.
The more miners on the network, the greater the amount of computer power is needed to mine new bitcoin. The hashrate falls if miners drop off the network, in theory making it easier for the remaining miners to produce new coin.