Bitcoin network power demand falls to 10.65GW as the hash rate decreases to 14 percent

Bitcoin network experienced 2022's lowest power demand of 10.65GW and a sharp decline in the hash rate

By Shashank Bhardwaj

Image: Shutterstock

According to the data published by the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance, the Bitcoin network is witnessing the year's lowest power demand of 10.65 GW (gigawatt). The highest recorded power demand by the network was 16.09 GW last year.

This drastic fall can be attributed to the two-week-long fall in the mining hash rate. This drop reduced computing power for mining Bitcoin blocks to 199.225 exahash per second (EH/s).

Hash rate is a principal security metric. It's the calculation per second performed by the computers that Bitcoin miners use to mine a block successfully. A disturbance in the hash rate can have a negative impact on the power demand of the Bitcoin network.

This fall in the hash rate directly contributed to the sudden fall in power demand. On June 13, Bitcoin's mining difficulty peaked at 231.428 EH/S. Later, in the following two weeks, the mining difficulty rate had a drop of 13.9 percent.

In the light of the latest breakdown of the hash rate distribution, F2Pool and AntPool emerged as the biggest miners in the Bitcoin ecosystem in the last four days, having mined 81 and 80 blocks during the same duration, respectively.

However, a report published by Cointelegraph reported that the banking sector was a greater culprit in extensive energy consumption than the Bitcoin network. IT utilises 50 times more energy than Bitcoin.

IT engineer, cryptographer, and consultant Michel Khazzaka said, “Bitcoin Lightning and Bitcoin, in general, are really great and very efficient technological solutions that deserve to be adopted on a large scale. This invention is brilliant enough, efficient enough, and powerful enough to get mass adoption.”

In another development, a team of researchers under federal funding has developed a class of stablecoins that would transmit energy as the form of information. This stablecoin is named Electricity Stablecoin or E-Stablecoin.

Electricity Stablecoin would work like any other Stablecoin except for the procedure used in mining it. It will require an input of one kilowatt per hour (KW/h) of electricity and a small fee.

On the other hand, Bitcoin's price experienced a high on June 26 as the demand from the whales in buying the dip saw an increase. Whales started buying Bitcoin while it was still below $20,000, giving rise to new support groups. Bitcoin hit $21,868 on Bitstamp, but just before the weekly close, it took a reverse and got settled at $21,500. It certainly is a time of great volatility with both positive and negative movements in the price of Bitcoin.

Shashank is the founder of yMedia. He ventured into crypto in 2013 and is an ETH maximalist. Twitter: @bhardwajshash

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