The Bitcoin network’s hashrate has mysteriously crashed over 40% on Monday, September 23, after it dipped from around 98 EH/s to around 57.7 EH/s before recovering.
The crash occurred after the hashrate hit a new all-time high above 100 EH/s on September 18. It isn’t clear what’s behind it, as competing networks using the same hashing algorithm – including the Bitcoin Satoshi’s Vision and Bitcoin Cash hard forks – didn’t see a significant hashrate increase, which means large miners didn’t choose to mine another cryptocurrency.
A cryptocurrency’s hashrate helps secure its network, as miners use their computing power to make calculations and find new blocks. Through Proof-of-Work, transactions on it are validated and the network becomes increasingly more secure, as hitting it with a 51% attack requires an increasingly large amount of computing power.
At press time, the hashrate on Bitcoin’s network has seemingly already started recovering, as it’s now at 88.3 million TH/s. Looking at hashrate distribution charts it doesn’t appear one single miner lost a large amount of computing in the last 24-hour period, although in the last few days BTC.com’s pool seemingly went from 19% to 24.2% of the network’s hashrate.
While the price of bitcoin has been struggling to stay above the $10,000 mark, its hashrate has been growing exponentially in the last few months. In July CryptoGlobe reported it hit 74.5 million TH/s, merely one month after hitting 65 million TH/s.
In comparison, the Bitcoin network’s hashrate was of little over 33 million TH/s at the beginning of the year, and of 2.5 million TH/s in the beginning of 2017, before the bull run that saw BTC hit a near $20,000 all-time high.
Featured image via Pixabay.com.
