What’s up with the hash rate crash today?

So today we had this weird 2-hour block delay from 06:03 to 08:02. After that, there were 4 blocks mined, then it took another 57 minutes for the next one to show up. Anyone heard anything concrete about big mining farms shutting down? The pools that managed to find those 6 blocks during the 2-hour downtime are: Huobi, FUPool, AntPool, RawPool, and Binance. So looks like they’re still operational. But then again, it could just be one of those long blocks, since a 2-hour wait is supposed to happen once every 162754.8 blocks. ... and that 57-minute block is supposed to happen once every 298.9 blocks. It'll be interesting to see if any of the major pools go quiet in the next day or so.

If something happened it wasn't just today... 686786     00000000000000000001e989be0b875b7426e4ff5c5c068c768711e8ca2d330e    2021-06-08 10:45 686944   000000000000000000024a1558e86d484b7fd01ff65f24eae3d39e76ecd80ecb   2021-06-09 10:48    687045   000000000000000000090bb122d7a645e09aab266e83dc10b2587818a2f75deb   2021-06-10 10:06 687150   000000000000000000043a9a7fabff084e4f2777902e77e8f9533deeb44af8c3   2021-06-11 10:07    We had 101 blocks and then 105 blocks in 24 hours intervals      https://btc.com/stats/pool?pool_mode=day Viabtc has passed them all in the last 24, 18%, hmmm Please be anything other than a shutdown,  we don't need another shitshow just now!

There was a news two days ago that China’s Qinghai Province issued a document to stop virtual currency mining operations, now they are not major mining zone but it could still affect Sichuan and Yunnan provinces that have no clear rules and regulations yet. Like I said before, there should be redistribution of Bitcoin mining to other countries, better sooner than later and South America looks very interesting now. Bitmain is already working on this and they had a meeting for mining industry moving abroad, and exporting to North America and Kazakhstan. https://twitter.com/btcinchina/status/1402629163387744256 https://twitter.com/btcinchina/status/1403271861589348357

This is exactly what it is, some of the biggest operations are moving their businesses elsewhere. Dumb move by Chinese officials imo, they’re going to regret this.

Since BTC does not know the "human clock" but it's easy for us to see: In the last hour there were 6 blocks. 6AM to 7AM EST so things might be getting back to normal. From 4AM to 5AM there were 5 blocks. But then as the OP pointed out there were some really long stretches in there. Going to have to see what happens over a longer time period. -Dave

Yeah, it is starting to look like it was just luck and coincidence after all. Of course since the hash rate looks like it is already down some, over the past few days as Stompix mentioned, the probabilities of longer blocks gets more likely. So that may be all the cause was. Funny though, since I'm the one who spends so much time explaining about block probabilities to people, that a 2 hour and a 1hr one shortly after surprised me Since the list I mentioned, there's been poolin, viabtc and the unknown bc1qf274x7... pool. Seems to already cover all the 10+EH pools (and few smaller) except BTC.com

Then according to Sino Global Capital, Xinjiang region has shut down mining because of a “rectification policy”, and that there are also currently other regions, Shihezi, Changji, and Korlam. https://twitter.com/sinoglobalcap/status/1402669487988514816 Although it also gave some hopium, “ It is unclear whether all of these restrictions will remain in place after the upcoming CCP anniversary this month”.

And since BTC.com is not just their own internal miners not finding blocks it could be something else within their network went really wrong. Looks like they lost about 5 EH/s of hash over the last day. No idea if it was their own miners or external ones. https://imgur.com/PGniyTl From here: https://pool.btc.com/?_ga=2.197132335.1206610082.1623367381-1275819641.1573002512 On mobile, so I can't insert the image for some reason. -Dave

Interesting! Does anyone know where the declining hashrate is coming from? Could it be related to the Chinese authorities cracking down on mining farms in China and closing a few overnight? That would be the only explanation for me at the moment!

Seems like this is the case, it coincide with the news that the Chinese government is cracking down on bitcoin mining. And there could be farms voluntarily shutting their services and then Chinese media putting some spin on it. Short term it can effect the price, but there's no need to panic. Maybe this "news" is already price-in as ber bitcoin is just hovering to $36k-$37k.

Yeah, something is definitely up with BTC.com they had 12 or so blocks on June 10th. They had a block a few seconds before midnight EST on the 10th (UTC -4) And none in the last 10+ hours. Even dropping from 17 to 12 EH/s they should have had some. Either as I said before they broke something really badly, or they forked off into their own world. [Yes that's the same as broke it badly] Or they decided to mine the crap out of another coin for some reason. Makes you wonder, did the mining ban say "Bitcoin" and not "Cryptocurrency" so they are testing the ban.... Edit: About 45 minutes after I made this post they found a block. -Dave

First I thought you were trolling with it, I was really surprised seeing you posting this. This actually matches the previous situation, we had a 25%-30% drop at that time, now we're seeing around 100 blocks per day, 102 currently in the last 24, if indeed they're shutting down and we're just entering a new period by Sunday with a 25% higher difficulty that it should be it's a deja-vu alright. Can't we have at least two weeks period with not some crap happening? Bcash has barely 2Exa, Sv has around 0.7, there is simply no coin there to point 5Exash and not lose a ton of money.

one rumor suggests chinese miners are being welcomed to Iran. which would probably balance out in the end; iranians want to trade with the world, not just chinese companies, and the chinese don't really want their currency in foreigners hands anyway (hence the onshore/offshore version of the yuan) still, there'll be plenty of drama till it settles down though

Meanwhile Sichuan, a much bigger mining region, wants miners to keep mining there (source), so it can't possibly be a hashrate crash. Temporary hardware faults are also a thing. This has been going on since at least yesterday, possibly earlier. It's probably just F2pool having a glitch, I haven't seen many blocks from them lately which is strange considering they're the biggest pool.

this is a hast that happened a few days ago but after that, I assume it will recover. due to several factors, maybe China or Iran itself only prohibits mining and there are several other policies regarding blockchain

Well the inaccurate estimate for the next diff is still going down also. Last night it was around -4.4% now it's around -4.7% with 246 blocks to go. An adjustment change of that much in 10 hours this close to the end might also imply a lot going offline. The previous -12.61% then 21.53% (early may) was clearly outage related that corrected itself. The last diff change of -15.97% was most likely due to the price drop. But another 'probable' drop in about 43 hours suggests more hardware going offline for other reasons since the price hasn't had another clear drop. Anyone know what that 'unknown' bc1qf274x7... pool is? Like most every large pool, they've joined the Taproot risk, empty block, SPV cartel (their last block was empty)

This post in the Speculation thread has links that may well give at least part of the reason for has drop: in at least 1 province of China (Xinjiang) power to ALL mining farms was cut off as of June 9 2p local time.

I believe Kazakhstan is another expected destination. I heard that one of the largest Chinese mining farms have already started sending their mining rigs there, and that it will take 2 to 3 months, or more, before it can be fully operational again. Plus why wouldn’t the Chinese not want the Yuan to be held by foreigners? They want to replace the U.S. Dollar as the world reserve currency, don’t they?

And the calculated (up to now) diff change would now be -5% So the diff change value is still dropping even though there's now only 158 blocks to go, or a little over 1.1 days to go to the next diff change. I noticed earlier in the 2016 blocks that it was actually very close to 0%, so this is looking like a drop larger than the diff change will show, so might also follow on into the next diff change, causing another drop.

Yeah we were 78 (edit from 82) blocks off the pace yesterday and we are now 98 off pace we have 156 blocks to go which should be 26 hours from now. I am guessing we will take more like 28-30 hours and end up 115-125 blocks off pace more gear is getting shut down. I clocked the off pace 26 hours ago so 78 off to 98 off in 26 hours   means 136 vs 156 that is down to 87.1 % of normal for that 26 hour time slot should be interesting to see the close out for the next jump do we drop 20 more blocks and go to 118 off pace. price is dropping a bit 35.4k