Bitcoin miners’ resilience to geopolitics — A healthy sign for the network
Considering that Bitcoin (BTC) is a blockchain network that uses a proof-of-work (PoW) consensus mechanism, miners are a highly significant part of the market dynamics of the network and the community itself. On Jan. 5, it was revealed that Kazakhstan shut down its internet services due to unprecedented political unrest sparked by rising fuel prices in the country.
The protests in Kazakhstan began on Jan. 2 in the town of Zhanaozen to fight against the government doubling the price of liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), which is widely used as car fuel in the country. This change in pricing came as a result of the gradual transition to the use of electronic trading of LPG in order to abolish the existing state subsidies for fuel and allow the market to discover the price of the asset.
However, protests in the region soon snowballed, gaining more momentum and continued despite the country’s government announcing that the prices of LPG would be brought down to a level lower than before the increase. Soon, this led to the country’s presiding cabinet resigning and the state-owned telecom company, Kazakhtelecom, shutting off the country’s internet services. Network data provider Netblocks reported that the normalized network connectivity fell down to 2%, with the government attempting to limit coverage on the escalating anti-government protests.
As a result, the Bitcoin network’s mining hash rate declined over 13% in the hours after the shutdown in the country from 205,000 petahash per second (PH/s) to 177,330 PH/s. Over the past year, the country grew to account for 18% of Bitcoin’s mining activity. A report from the Data Center Industry & Blockchain Association of Kazakhstan estimated that cryptocurrency mining would bring in $1.5
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