A major cryptocurrency mining operation has been severely affected in the Chinese province of Sichuan due to heavy rains on 27 & 28 June resulting in devastating floods. This news was reported by a local blockchain and crypto news website Golden Finance.
Because of the cheap electric bills and low population, Sichuan has become a mining giant. This is convenient since the process of mining, the verification of a transaction by the means of solving elaborate algorithms, requires a lot of computational power and hence a lot of electricity.
It is unclear whether the proclaimed tens of thousands of affected mining devices can be repaired since the damage is reportedly irreversible. Also unknown is how many units have been lost to the flood or what cryptocurrencies were they mining.
There has been some speculation that the floods in the province of Sichuan are linked to the drop in bitcoin’s total computational power (hashrate). However, if we look at the data from Blockchain.com, an increase in hashrate can be seen from June 27 to 28, and it is evident that the overall drop in hashrate was not significant and could not have influenced the whole network.
