Heavy downpours that have recently been affecting the Sichuan province in China allegedly barely affected cryptocurrency miners in the region, according to the owner of prominent mining pool BTC.Top Jiang Zhuoer.
During an interview with local news outlet National Business Daily, Zhuoer revealed large mining operations are prepared for such events, and as such weren’t significantly affected. He stated:
In reality, last month’s heavy rain in Sichuan province had little impact on the bitcoin mining farms there, and only a few devices were destroyed by the massive flood.
Social media users have been sharing a picture that seems to show dozens – or hundreds – of ASIC cryptocurrency miners seemingly damaged by the flood. With the picture, came rumors that “tens of thousands” of mining rigs had been destroyed, leading to a dip in BTC’s hashrate.
The picture, per Zhouer, shows what happened to a “small-scale mining farm” in the region that was operating in a facility it built, without being authorized to do so. Per the mining pool owner, the operation’s owners weren’t expecting the floods when they built their facilities, and as such were caught off guard.
He said that “only” 200 to 300 mining rigs were destroyed because of the floods, something he claims had “little or no effect on the entire network’s computational power.” Torrential rain, he added, is a “common thing” during the summer.
While he touted large mining operations like his are prepared for these events, smaller operations may suffer. He was quoted as saying:
But days of torrential rainfall might force some small hydropower stations to close due to floods, then leading to the shutdown of mining machines.
Notably, available data does show the flagship cryptocurrency saw its hashrate drop at the same time analysts claimed the floods destroyed mining equipment. When asked about the drop, Zhouer claimed “the dip in hashrate this time was really no more than standard variance.”
Floods have been getting the crypto community’s attention. As CryptoGlobe covered, leading cryptocurrency exchange Binance has recently revealed it’s set to donate $1 million to flood victims in Japan, in cryptocurrency or in the Japanese Yen. The company’s CEO, Changpeng Zhao, asked for the community’s support.
