Goldan Finance (金色财经) is a local blockchain and crypto information platform that provided horrifying pictures about the flood of Sichuan province that also caused heavy damage to the famous cryptocurrency miners in the area.

Heavy rains started on the 27th of June kept on going on the next day as well, resulting in a loss of “tens of thousands” of mining devices in the province, additionally the miners seem to be impossible to repair according to the source. The exact number of hardware going down in the flood is yet unknown.

Mining is the process of using devices to solve difficult computations resulting in the building of a blockchain (block by block) and issuing of new coins as a reward for the work. The most resource heavy mining process is the BTC mining, for which the difficulty has increased heavily over the past years, resulting in a stunning energy consumption. A report claims that alone BTC mining will take up 0.5% of the world’s energy consumption by the end of 2018.

Eric Meltzer, a partner at INBlokchchain which is the largest blockchain fund in China has published some photos about the destroyed ASIC miners on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/wheatpond/status/1012786820617252865

Info from blockchain.com shows that a significant drop occurred during these days.While many people expected a larger drop in hashrate, it is worth to note that majority of BTC hashrate is coming from mining pools such as BTC.com, AntPool or ViaBTC and these pools source the computational power from all around the world. So even though these mining centers were affected, the overall impact was not that critical compared to usual fluctuations.