BIT Mining ‘unlikely’ to flee Kazakhstan amid political unrest
Despite the declaration of emergency leading to major internet blackouts amid an anti-government protest in Kazakhstan, several of its Bitcoin mining operators are not making plans of leaving the country of yet.
One of Kazakhstan’s largest mining companies, their BIT Mining, which had initially relocated from China just last year, has expressed it is still in the process of evaluating the impact of political unrest in the country.
A spokesperson from the firm has said that it t is “unlikely” that their mining machines would be evacuated to North America.
The company representative has also noted that Kazakhstan is not BIT Mining’s main centre of business; instead, a big number of “mid-to-high-end mining machines” are deployed in North America. They said that it is not likely that the machines would now be withdrawn from Kazakhstan and taken to North America, adding that further actions after close monitoring of the ground situation would be disclosed.
According to other sources, Kazakhstan-based miners have been managing to keep their units online despite the unprecedented internet outages.
Blockchain journalist from China, Colin Wu, has reported that some Kazakhstan miners had told the media that the internet “was temporarily restored on January 7th” in addition to the 4G network of Chinese phones that have also been rendered intermittently effective.
Wu further said that the Kazakhstan miners and crypto industry experts have been expecting the country would return to normalcy by Monday, January 10.
News sources have also said that some miners’ operations had been nearly unaffected as they are mostly located in remote areas, while major protests have been concentrated in the urban area of Almaty.
According to the fresh data from NetBlocks, a network stability data provider, the country’s internet had been shut down for 36 hours by Friday morning as connectivity levels stood at 5 per cent.
However, despite the ongoing nationwide blackouts, the unrest in Kazakhstan seems to have had little or no effect on the global Bitcoin hash, as per local industrial sources. Data from Blockchain.com, a major blockchain explorer, has indicated that the total BTC hash rate has not dropped even once since the start of 2022.
BIT Mining, as well as other Kazakhstan mining services operators such as the Chinese firm Canaan has not immediately responded to any comments.
