Yesterday, data showed that the computing power of Bitcoin plummeted by 30%, causing panic in the entire market and concerns about network security.
But in fact, you don't need to worry too much. Bitcoin's mining power is an indicator of computing power – it can be used to generate new blocks to earn bitcoin. The miners tried to find a hash that met the established criteria by colliding with the hash. At the same time, the power spent on the Bitcoin blockchain is used to secure the network and process transactions.
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Recently, bitcoin computing power has reached a new high, breaking through 100 exahash per second (this is already a lot). However, yesterday, it dropped from 98 exahash to 67 exahash, a drop of 32%, which is staggering. But it all depends on how the data is measured.
Because the Bitcoin network is decentralized, there are thousands of people who have bitcoin mining equipment from hard drives to an entire warehouse. Therefore, in order to truly understand the current bitcoin computing power, you must know how much computing power each person has. Obviously, this is unrealistic.
Instead, the data provider is reverse-operating and uses statistical techniques to estimate the current computational power. In this case, they are considering the speed of bitcoin block mining and the difficulty of the current network. Taking these factors into consideration, together with some statistical techniques, they came up with a plausible estimate.
But this is not perfect.
This statistical mode sets the average block time to 10 minutes. However, if the block time is faster or slower or purely random, rather than being changed by power, this may change the estimate of the power. Therefore, if the miners are not lucky, and the time of the block happens to be very long, there will be a phenomenon of impending collapse.
However, it is difficult to judge whether the power is really plummeting – as I said before, you have to ask all the miners how much power they have.
In order to avoid anomalies, we must look at the power from a long-term perspective. Blockstream Chief Strategy Officer Samson Mow said:
“Only during a significant period of time (more than one day, maybe two days), long-term changes in computing power make sense.”
But what happened to the 30% decline in the calculation yesterday?
Cosmos researcher Sunny Aggarwal expressed his opinion on this:
"Yesterday may be just a strange episode. This seems to be possible, but I am a bit skeptical because the block time of many blocks has been extended and lasted for a long time, not just a few blocks. ”
Aggarwal said it is also possible that “a technical failure has occurred in a mine or mine, or a migration is taking place, causing them to temporarily stop mining. For me, this seems to be the most likely.”
But the truth is, we will never know – unless the Bitcoin miners say it themselves.
