Bitcoin hash-rate estimate drops 38% amid North American freeze

Bitcoin's estimated computing power fell sharply on December 24, 2022 as a North American winter storm pushed large U.S. miners to suspend machines and power systems prepared for exceptional demand. Glassnode's daily mean-hash-rate series put the network at 156.36 exahashes per second on December 24, down from 252.98 EH/s on December 21.

Coinburn calculates that change as a 38.19% decline over the three-day measurement window: (252.98 minus 156.36) divided by 252.98. It was a striking interruption for a network whose miners normally operate continuously, but it was not evidence that 38.19% of identifiable machines had permanently disappeared.

What the network data showed

Hash rate is an estimate, not a direct meter reading. Glassnode derives it from observed block intervals and the mining difficulty then in force. A single daily value can therefore move with random variation in how quickly miners find blocks, as well as with machines actually switching off. The figures describe estimated network-wide computation, not a census of U.S. or Texas facilities.

Even with that limitation, the direction matched public operational signals. Core Scientific said on December 23 that it expected bitcoin production to decline while participating in multiple power curtailments during the extreme cold. Riot Blockchain had said on December 21 that it would close its Rockdale, Texas, facility because of the weather. Those company notices did not quantify their contributions to the December 24 network reading, so attribution to any single operator would be speculative.

The episode mattered because Bitcoin's proof-of-work system adjusts only periodically. When a large share of effective hash power vanishes between difficulty adjustments, blocks can arrive more slowly until miners return or the protocol retargets difficulty. That can reduce transaction-confirmation capacity temporarily without changing Bitcoin's transaction rules, supply schedule or ownership ledger.

A grid event became a Bitcoin event

The electrical context was unusually severe. ERCOT's December 23 market notice said the U.S. Department of Energy had found an electric reliability emergency in Texas and authorized specified generators to exceed certain permit limits during tightly defined periods from December 23 through December 25, subject to emergency conditions. The notice shows the grid was operating under exceptional safeguards; it does not say ERCOT ordered every Bitcoin miner offline.

For flexible industrial loads, shutting down could serve two purposes at once: protect equipment and staff, and free electricity when heating demand was critical. Bitcoin mining's ability to curtail quickly was therefore visible at network scale on December 24. The same event also exposed geographic concentration risk: a weather shock affecting a major mining region could be detected globally through block production.

The fall did not mean Bitcoin stopped. Blocks continued to be produced, and no consensus failure was reported in the cited records. The event was better understood as a stress test of mining geography and energy dependence than as a break in the protocol.

Later-confirmed context

A January 4, 2023 operational update from Riot later confirmed that it had voluntarily curtailed in anticipation of the December storm. Riot also reported storm damage affecting about 2.5 EH/s of capacity at its Rockdale immersion buildings and $4.9 million in December power credits. Those figures clarify the episode but were not available on December 24, 2022, and they cover Riot or the full month rather than the entire Bitcoin network on the event date.