The temporary loss of mining power underscores academic concerns that geographic and pool concentration can magnify infrastructure failures, though markets showed little immediate reaction.
The temporary loss of mining power underscores academic concerns that geographic and pool concentration can magnify infrastructure failures, though markets showed little immediate reaction.Bitcoin’s hashrate fell about 10 percent during a U.
S. winter storm, underscoring how local power disruptions can strain the network’s capacity to process transactions. Researchers have shown that concentrated mining, as seen in a 2021 regional outage in China, can lead to slower block times, higher fees and broader market disruptions. With a few large pools now controlling most of Bitcoin’s hashrate, the network is increasingly vulnerable to localized infrastructure failures, even as the price of BTC remains largely unaffected in the short term., is offering a real-time stress test of a concern long flagged by researchers: mining centralization has turned local infrastructure failures into system-level risks.available to process transactions required to keep the Bitcoin blockchain running at any given moment. When it drops sharply, the network has less room to process transactions, increasing the risk of delays before the difficulty resets.While the Bitcoin blockchain continued to operate through the storm – as only 10% of the blockchain's hashrate went offline – a growing body of academic research suggests its exposure to such events has grown., researchers Philipp Scharnowski and Jiahua Shi found that a regional mining outage in China in 2021 led to longer block times, higher transaction fees, and degraded market quality, showing how concentrated mining can turn local power failures into network-wide disruptions. That research helps contextualize why rising concentration in BTC mining matters, as block production has increasingly clustered among a handful of dominant pools.indicates that block production is now dominated by a small number of pools, reducing the network’s ability to absorb localized shocks.Over the past two years, the top two mining pools have often controlled more than 50% of Bitcoin’s hash rate, while the top six pools have consistently accounted for roughly 80% to 90% of all blocks, leaving much of the network’s transaction processing in the hands of a few operators. For now, markets appear unfazed, as BTC barely moved on the day, but the episode highlights how the Bitcoin blockchain's growing mining concentration can turn physical infrastructure failures into system-level stress without immediately showing up in the price.KuCoin captured a record share of centralised exchange volume in 2025, with more than $1.25tn traded as its volumes grew faster than the wider crypto market.for the year, signalling broad-based usage rather than reliance on a single product line., reinforcing KuCoin’s role as a primary liquidity venue beyond BTC and ETH at a time when majors saw more muted turnover.Bitcoin is hovering near $87,000 and is on track for a fourth consecutive negative monthly close, a pattern not seen since 2018. Jan. 30 options expiry on Deribit totals about $8.5 billion in notional value, with heavy interest in $100,000 calls and a max pain level near $90,000.20 hours ago
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