Harsh Weather Hits US Miners, Bitcoin Hashrate Sinks

The Bitcoin network is going through a turbulent period. Its computing power, the hashrate, records a sharp drop, the most significant in several years. This major technical decline draws the attention of mining specialists and analysts, at a time when the crypto ecosystem is already under increasing pressure. Between market volatility and declining mining profitability, warning signals are accumulating, revealing a tense start to the year for sector players. This performance drop raises questions about the operational resilience of the network.

A historic drop in hashrate

A new alert threshold has been crossed on the Bitcoin network, as the flagship crypto has just dropped out of the top 10 global assets. According to data published by CryptoQuant, the global hashrate fell by 12% since November 11, reaching its lowest level since October 2021.

This decline in computing power marks the biggest contraction observed since the mining ban in China, which caused a massive exodus of operators to other jurisdictions.

In detail, several key figures illustrate the extent of the phenomenon :

• The hash rate fell from over 630 EH/s to around 560 EH/s in less than two months ;
• The daily revenue of mining specialists dropped to around 28 million dollars, one of the lowest observed in the last 12 months ;
• CryptoQuant’s “Miner Profit and Loss Sustainability” indicator shows degraded levels, comparable to those at the end of 2024 ;
• The participation rate of North American mining farms is reported to have declined due to technical constraints.

This sharp decline is explained by a combination of external factors, notably extreme weather conditions in the United States, which forced some mining companies to reduce their activity to avoid overloading local power grids.

The impact is twofold: both on block production and on the profitability of operators who, in many cases, now have to reassess their business model in an uncertain context.

A tense operational context

The hashrate contraction has been largely linked to exceptional weather conditions in the United States, which forced several mining operations to reduce their activity or temporarily take their machines offline in order to stabilize local power grids and avoid overloads.

This explanation, supported by field data, shows how external factors, here an intense cold wave, can impact the overall computing power of such a vast and decentralized network.

The immediate consequences of this phenomenon are multiple. A drop in hashrate tends to slightly increase block validation delays, as less computing power is available to solve consensus equations. It also puts increased pressure on the profitability of mining companies still in operation, as their fixed costs (mainly energy and infrastructure maintenance) do not decrease proportionally to the hashrate decline.

From a more structural standpoint, such a significant hashrate drop raises a robustness question: the more computing power a network loses, the more potentially vulnerable it becomes to attack attempts or consensus manipulation, though Bitcoin is historically designed to absorb such events. Nevertheless, prolonged erosion of computing power can affect the confidence of institutional players and long-term investors.

In the longer term, automatic protocol adjustments, notably mining difficulty recalibrated every 2,016 blocks, should mitigate some negative effects observed by facilitating block creation even with reduced computing power. These adjustments are one of Bitcoin network’s intrinsic resilience mechanisms, allowing its operation to adapt to cyclical variations in mining specialists’ participation, whose stocks continue to decline.