trustnodes.com
The bitcoin network currently is heavily congested with average fees rising as an unknown amount of hashpower is turned off in Sichuan, the world’s bitcoin mining capital.
The electricity supply for at least the 26 biggest mining farms there was shut off just a few minutes ago at midnight Shanghai time.
Since then, no block has yet been found as the network operates at a lower hash, but the same difficulty.
Difficulty as you might know is an algorithmic measure set every two weeks that aims to maintain an equation of global hash times ten minutes equals block found.
According to blockchain data, difficulty has dropped by 10%, suggesting prior to the shut off there was a 10% hash fall.
What’s happened since is subjects to estimates with those estimates themselves based on how many blocks are found and in what amount of time.
Until blocks start rolling, therefore, we won’t quite know just what exactly happened or is happening in Sichuan.
We’ll update once a block is found with this situation not unusual as there have been many occasions when a block is not found for an hour, but it remains to be seen how long this one will take.
This slow transaction processing is to continue for at least nine days, at which point the difficulty re-adjusts to target 10 minute blocks based on the global hashrate in nine days.
Some miners moreover are viedoed leaving, so at least some of this hash will come back on, perhaps outside of China depending on how long the migration takes.