Apr 20, 2021 A recent plummet in hash rate and spike in transaction fees has raised some questions about Bitcoinâs resilience. But they shouldnât. Over the weekend, the Bitcoin hash rate dropped off a cliff, leaving many industry participants wondering what had happened. Over the last couple of days, information and context has been provided by industry experts as to what was behind this steep fall in hash rate. For instance, this Twitter thread by Mustafa Yilham does a great job explaining the current situation. TLDR: A large amount of Bitcoin miners in the Xinjiang region had to shut off their machines, due to a water leakage in a coal mining plant that led the central and local governments in China to temporarily shut down operations at other coal mining operations. As it is still the “dry season” in China, a majority of Bitcoin mining operations leverage under-utilized/over-supplied electricity sources, of which a majority in China (about 80%) are currently located in the Xinjiang province, where the shutdowns were occurring.