Bitcoin Hashrate Fell to Lowest Level in Five Months

Bitcoin hashrate has fallen by more than 27% in 24 hours to 159.41 exahashes per second (EH/s) on Wednesday, the lowest since February this year, according to BTC.com.

Hashrate, or the level of computing power used per second to mine, is related to changes in the complexity of cryptocurrency mining – an indicator of how hard a miner has to work to verify transactions in the blockchain to mine a cryptocurrency.

Earlier Bloomberg reported that several crypto mining companies in Texas, the mining centre in the US, halted operations as electricity costs soared amid a heat wave, and the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) called on homes and businesses to limit electricity consumption during peak times as temperatures soared above 40 °C in most major cities in the state.

A similar situation is occurring elsewhere in the world, where extreme heat and overloaded power grids have forced mining companies to suspend cryptocurrency mining, leading to a marked drop in global hashrates. For example, the Iranian government cut off power to mining companies in Iran at the end of June as the country recorded record electricity consumption of 62,500 megawatts at peak times.

As a result of the latest bitcoin (BTC) price collapse, when its value fell to $17,000, the phrase "Bitcoin is dead" is starting to come back into vogue, according to Google Trends, reflecting a general atmosphere of uncertainty among investors in the cryptocurrency market.