Bitcoin hashrate drops 10-20% due to massive floods in China

As of Tuesday, bitcoin hashrate dropped by 25% due to massive landslides in Sichuan province. The landslides caused by heavy downpour caused the Sichaun province to trigger a Level I response, the highest in its tier four-tier emergency response system.

Bitcoin mining and Sichuan province

With bitcoin successfully breaching the $12,000 level, things seemed to be doing well for miners. Considering cheap electricity costs due to hydro season and bitcoin price, the hashrate did hit a record average high of 129 EH/s as of August 15.

However, with the recent development in Sichuan and the miner concentration in the area, the hashrate drop is obvious. In effect, the hashrate dropped from 140 EH/s to 105 EH/s.

Source: Coinmetrics

The top mining pool Poolin saw a 20% drop in its hashrate from 20 EH/s to 16EH/s. The same 20-25% drop can be seen with F2Pool and other top 5 bitcoin mining pools.

This will affect bitcoin difficulty, which was positively adjusted with an increase of 0.59%. On average, the difficulty adjustment has been positive since June 16, however, the drop in hashrate due to the landslides might affect this with a negative adjustment difficulty soon.

This is the third major drop in hashrate in 2020, with the first drop in March, the second during the bitcoin halving and finally, the third drop comes as of August 18.