Not only the Netherlands and Belgium have been struggling with enormous temperatures lately, Texas had the same problem. In fact, it was such a problem that the US government has asked cryptocurrency miners to temporarily stop mining. Riot Blockchain did not lose money on this, but made a lot of money on it.
Compensation for staking bitcoin mining ASICs
The company writes that in a press release. The Texas federal government has given Riot $9.5 million in compensation for evicting some of the miners. This amount is deducted from the amount it has spent on electricity. Yet the compensation is considerably more than what it would have spent on electricity. At an average bitcoin price in July of 21,634 US dollars, this could have been about 439 bitcoins.
How much the hash rate has gone down is unknown, nor do we know how many Riot miners have gone offline. At least we know that the hashrate in July was about 28% lower in July 2021. As a result, it has produced 318 BTC, instead of 443 BTC. In total, on July 31, it had 6,696 bitcoins, which it produced all by itself.
The total hash rate of Riot is currently about 4.2 exahash per second (EH/s)which is about 2% of the hashrate of the entire network. It currently has about 40,311 ASIC miners running. Another part is currently being moved from a hosting company location to the in-house Whinstone location.
Energy shortage in Texas
huhIt seems that the miner eviction only applied to last month. The shutdown had to do with the enormous heat in Texas, but also with the pressure that Riot puts on the electricity grid. Due to the heat wave, many households and companies will have air conditioners on, which will put extra pressure on the electricity grid.
According to Bloomberg almost all major miners have taken a break. In fact, Core Scientific has disabled 100% of its features. Lee Bratcher, chairman of the Texas Blockchain Council, told the business newspaper that Texas supplies more than 1,000 megawatts to bitcoin miners. That is more than 1% of the total capacity of the electricity network, which can now be used by households and companies.
