Enlarge image
Demonstrators in Almaty on January 4th: Since the protests broke out, the activities of large mining pools have also fluctuated
Photo: RUSLAN PRYANIKOV / AFP
The unrest in Kazakhstan is apparently also causing movement in the business of the so-called Bitcoin miners.
These earn money by validating Bitcoin transactions with complicated arithmetic operations and thus enabling the digital currency to continue operating.
Your activities have no direct impact on the price of Bitcoin itself, but they play an important role in the functioning of the network.
Kazakhstan is the second most important location worldwide for Bitcoin miners, who often join together to form so-called pools for mining Bitcoin. According to an analysis by researchers at Cambridge University, the so-called hash rate of miners in the country was 18 percent in August, making it second in the world. The value of the shows how active miners are and has increased steadily in the country over the past year. After a stricter regulation of mining in China, many Bitcoin miners apparently migrated to Kazakhstan.
But since this week Kazakh miners have been facing a major problem because they depend on a stable connection to the Internet.
The Kazakh government temporarily cut access to the network this week.
It was only on Friday that President Kassym-Jormart Tokayev announced that the Internet connection should be restored at least in some regions of the country where the situation is stable.
As can be seen from data from the industry platform BTC.com, the large mining pool "Antpool" has recorded a decrease in hashrate of around 14.6 percent since Tuesday, and other pools also suffered significant drops.
From where these pools mainly operate is not known in the rather secretive mining business.
Fluctuations in mining are generally not unusual, but the current declines are noticeable.
Environmental problems from mining
The overall mining activity on the Bitcoin network did not decrease significantly this week.
This suggests that miners from other countries have taken the chance and are now making more themselves.
So it stands to reason that problems for Kazakh miners could lead to a global shift in the world of Bitcoin miners.
From an environmental point of view, Bitcoin mining has come under fire because the computing operations required for it consume a lot of electricity.
According to Cambridge researchers, the Bitcoin network currently consumes about as much electricity as the whole of Ukraine, and mining also generates a lot of electronic waste.
The fact that many mining operations take place in Kazakhstan is particularly problematic for Bitcoin's carbon footprint because Kazakhstan gets a large part of its electricity from old coal-fired power plants.
hpp / Reuters / dpa