Bitcoin Hash Rate Still Climbing Despite Value Decline

Bitcoin’s hash rate is still growing despite the cryptocurrency losing more than 60 percent of its previous value, Forbes reported. In December 2017, Bitcoin was trading at $19,000, but it has since fallen from that figure. As of this writing, the cryptocurrency is currently valued at $6,176 dropping from its value yesterday of $6,336.

But even when Bitcoin is seeing all these negative figures, miners have yet to give up hope and are continuing to run their operations. In fact, the computing power behind the Bitcoin network has increased by 100 percent in the last four months.

This bodes well for Bitcoin in the long term as increasing hash rate means that a lot of people are still willing to support it. However, the energy industry will take the brunt of this escalating number as a higher computing rate means more power demand to run the Bitcoin network.

For this reason, miners are relocating to regions that have plenty of renewable energy as they are environmentally friendly and are cheaper to purchase. Places like Switzerland and Canada are ideal for Bitcoin miners to conduct their operations as both these countries produce substantial amounts of green energy.

However, because a lot of companies are moving their headquarters to these territories, the public utility is having a hard time keeping up with the high energy demand by these crypto companies mining Bitcoin and other digital currencies. It’s gotten to a point that even governments have intervened in order to find a middle ground.

For instance, the provincial government of Quebec had instructed Hydro-Quebec to stop processing requests from crypto miners until they figured something out. A few weeks later, Hydro-Quebec proposed a criterion that would help identify which crypto companies can bring in the most benefits for the region. This way, the companies can receive power while ensuring that they are going to generate advantages for Quebec such as jobs and investments.

Of course, this didn’t solve the whole situation as energy is still being consumed by crypto companies at a tremendous rate. And with the Bitcoin computing power still escalating, it’s expected that this trend will be mirrored by other crypto networks.