Bitcoin weekend price drop, explanation #2 (or is it #3?) is the China power blackout

If you’ve been out and about on the weekend and missed the moves, BTC has given back some of its recent gain:

  • Black Sunday for crypto as bitcoin and others plunge
  • Bitcoin weekend price drop – biggest in nearly 2 months
As for the headline to this post, here is the argument on China’s power blackouts triggering the drop:
  • blackout in China’s Xinjiang region (reportedly powers a lot of bitcoin mining)
  • saw a nearly 50% decline in bitcoin’s hash rate (this measures the processing power being used to mine BTC cryptocurrency, process its transactions)
  • blackouts in China’s Xinjiang region said to be caused by a coal mine explosion in Xinjiang on April 10 ( … maybe they can lift their ban on Australian coal … hmmmm? tee hee), but the blackouts took days to hit bitcoin’s hash rate, which fell from a record high above 215 exahash per second on Wednesday to about 120 exahash per second early on Sunday
April 10 explosion …. impact on April 18. Really? Is this an example of a back-fitted narrative? Anyway, there you go, check out the two linked posts above for alternative explanations.
The latest talk I have heard is 9000 BTC were sold in a series of hits from one Chinese-based ‘whale’. I am a fan of simple explanations and this seems the most likely I have heard.
BTC update:
If you've been out and about on the weekend and missed the moves, BTC has given back some of its recent gain:
The background to this is that price and hash rate do tend to show correlation. The good news would be, if indeed this is the ’cause’ of the price drop, is that once the hash rate starts to normalize the price of bitcoin should start to recover.