cointelegraph.com
Bitcoin (BTC) fell to sudden lows of $52,000 on April 18 in a timely reminder of how price action often follows hash rate.
Coin Metrics co-founder Nic Carter was similarly unfazed as the Xinjiang problems began, but forecast that media interest in the event would be significant.
"If the outage lasts 3 weeks then bitcoin will have a historically large difficulty adjustment but I think that’s unlikely — either grid comes back online or miners will move their hardware," he said as part of a social media discussion on Saturday.
Bitcoin's difficulty declines when miners exit the network, but according to the latest estimates, its next adjustment will only see a modest 1.8% decline.
No panic among hodlers
Meanwhile, another topic allegedly roiling sentiment appeared to be a single tweet about U.S. legal action.
U.S. TREASURY TO CHARGE SEVERAL FINANCIAL INSTITUTIONS FOR MONEY LAUNDERING USING CRYPTOCURRENCIES -SOURCES
— FXHedge (@Fxhedgers) April 18, 2021
Surfacing right at the time of the price crash, Twitter account FXHedge quoted anonymous "sources" as warning over regulators taking unnamed "financial institutions" to court over money laundering related to cryptocurrency.
No other details were given, but the tweet swiftly gained over 5,000 likes and almost as many retweets, with the $52,000 nosedive then ensuing.
While mainstream media seized on the action, seasoned Bitcoiners were as cool as ever about what was just business as usual in a bull run.
"Honestly, after you've been in the game long enough, you go numb to Bitcoin price dips," podcast host Steven Livera tweeted.
"Just Bitcoin doing its thing on the way to $10M+."
At the time of writing, BTC/USD had recovered about half of its losses to trade above $56,000.
Rafael Schultze-Kraft, co-founder and CTO of on-chain monitoring resource Glassnode, cited a classic on-chain metric as proof that now was a perfect time to buy Bitcoin.
The spent transaction output ratio (SOPR), which measures overall profit and loss, had "reset" for the first time since after March's all-time highs of $61,700.
