Link: Kazakhstan internet shutdown sheds light on a big Bitcoin mining mystery
Emphasis mine:
Violent protests erupted over the soaring cost of fuel and [Kazakhstan’s] autocratic rule. President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev sacked his government and declared a state of emergency. Apparently on his orders, the largest telecom provider shuttered the internet to interrupt communications among the opposition’s ranks. When the web goes down, miners can’t communicate with the Bitcoin network. The “hash rate,” the random codes that win fresh awards of Bitcoin, collapses. A few hours into the outage, Larry Cermak of the crypto news and research site The Block tweeted that a full 12% of Bitcoin’s worldwide computational power had vanished. His data showed sharp declines for a number of producers with operations in Kazakhstan. The hash rates for AntPool, Poolin and Binance Pool all fell between 12% and 16%.
Blimey.