Kazakhstan’s recent turmoil has led in extensive internet outages, which have harmed Bitcoin mining, putting the issue to the forefront of the cryptocurrency world.
Interestingly, in September 2019, the Bitcoin mining business in China accounted for a whopping 75.5 percent of all computer energy utilised. However, the landscape has evolved dramatically since China’s cryptocurrency crackdown, with China’s involvement plummeting to 0% in the summer of 2021, according to statistics from the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance.
In comparison, Bitcoin miners using US IP addresses consumed only 4.1 percent of total computer energy in September 2019, referred to as the ‘hashrate’ (or hash rate), but have now surpassed a third of total consumption, accounting for 35.4 percent, more than eight times the amount consumed two years ago.
Kazakhstan is the nation undergoing the most substantial transformation, according to the data, which is based on the IP addresses of mining facility owners who connect to the servers of mining pools.
Indeed, Kazakhstan’s hashrate was just 1.4 percent in September 2019, but after China quit the cryptocurrency mining market, the country’s hashrate has increased to 18.1 percent as of August 2021, more than twelve times what it was only two years earlier.
Kazakhstan’s involvement in cryptocurrency mining has been brought back into the public limelight as a result of the country’s current political crisis, which resulted in an internet blackout, which some have blamed to the recent decline in the price of Bitcoin.
El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele is embroiled in an online spat with Steve Hanke, a professor of applied economics at Johns Hopkins University.
Hanke said that the projected Bitcoin City in El Salvador is unsuited for purpose and is only a PR ploy by the country’s President, Nayib Bukele.
“Nayib Bukele’s projected Bitcoin City is about as well-prepared for winter as Florida is. The City’s claimed energy source is a dormant volcano. This is simply another example of a narcissistic president’s attention-seeking actions,” he remarked.
In response to the economist’s criticism of the planned metropolis and his assertion that the volcano is “inactive,” El Salvador’s President Bukele took to Twitter to call Hanke a “idiot,” claiming that geothermal energy is extracted from wells near dormant volcanoes and that it would be foolish to build a city beneath an active volcano.
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