Bitcoin Forum

As you probably know, the other day there was essentially an overthrow of the government in Kazakhstan. The reasons are internal global discontent, rising prices, and problems accumulated and not resolved for decades. Plus, not wanting to leave the presidency, the current president decided to "invite" foreign servicemen to his country and give them the right to kill with impunity the local population who want changes in the country and simply want to live a normal life. The massacre has already begun, and the Kazakhs and the invaders have already died. The occupation troops are regular units of the army of Russia, Belarus, Armenia. This is an introduction to the situation.

In essence, the topic is Kazakhstan, after difficulties with crypt in China, part of the mining farms migrated to Kazakhstan. A week ago, Kazakhstan owned approximately 15% of the world's mining capacity. Now the situation is destabilized, a military invasion, which will definitely lead to massive confrontations and destruction, can lead to a halt in mining in the country (the Internet is almost massively disabled). what do you think - what are the consequences of this conflict, in the regional economy, in the world of the crypt?

Is this not just a Russian invasion?

Kinda seems like a:
1. Plant insurgents
2. Get insurgents to start a protest, then a riot and then test how easy the government is to overthrow
3. If 2 didn't work, sleep on it and try to destabalise when you get another idea.
3. If 2 did work, start ivasion with more troops.

Russia is probably still annoyed its intentions to invade Ukraine were kinda quashed by the EU and US.

No, this is not at all like that. There is an absolutely precisely recorded chronology of the beginning of the protests. The start was a 2-fold increase in gas prices. Just like that, on the morning of January 1, people saw that at gas stations the price increased by 2 times. And they began a protest, demanding the return of an adequate price. In the early days, the government simply ignored the protests, and protests began to take place across the country. After that, the government decided to quickly resign, and the current president (in fact, the executor of the will of the previous president), decided to involve the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the army to disperse the protesters. And then it turned out that the PEOPLE are not ready to endure such an attitude. Partially, the army and the Ministry of Internal Affairs went over to the side of the PEOPLE and did not carry out the criminal orders. After that, realizing that he would not sit in the presidential chair for a long time, the president, hiding behind the Security Treaty, asked the countries belonging to this association to send troops and destroy the protesters. Although yes, in Russia they have already said that it was all the Soros Foundation organized :)

I currently don't know much about the entire picture so I have no comment on economical effects. Crypto-wise though, I don't think it would be anything significant. Just ending up with Bitcoin having lower hashrate, and probably more opportunity for other miners. Some people are actually speculating that this caused the BTC drop; I personally don't think so.

Hope this will be more crypto orientated than politics, we had enough of those.


Direct consequences? As real consequences determined by a fact? Zero.

I'm honestly tired of the whole mining debate for a while, I simply can't cover this subject anymore with a cool head, you can check my post in Difficulty Speculation topic (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5378628.0), in the news topic (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5380170.msg58917784#msg58917784) about Kazakhstan, in the other topic (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5380083.msg58914722#msg58914722) about it, simply I can't anymore.One can look at any graph out there, blockchain (https://www.blockchain.com/charts/hash-rate), bitinfocharts (https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-hashrate.html#3m) and see that nothing special happened on the 5th. Nothing!

I'm posting this since it's a moderated topic and I hope the quality of the debate will be different than in the rest where is headline and comment, post after post till the quota is reached, so for with the last ounce of giving a damn about this whole mess I might convince somebody, one extra person that there was nothing at all.

Now, consequences on the price?
That's a different story, you don't need something to even be real to have consequences on the price, it can be fake news that leads to a rally (see the amazon case) or fake news that drives the price down (infinite examples), it can be things people don't understand that they think are extraordinarily bad or good and take millisecond decisions that lead to stupid outcomes.

And you can see that now, what changed between Jan 2nd and Jan 7th fundamentally to trigger an almost -10% drop? Nothing! So...

Consequences of the future of mining?
As I said, nothing happened so there shouldn't be any consequences to something that was never there but if somehow the Kazak government decides to ban mining, there is always Texas, which btw produces 4 times more electricity than Kazakhstan.

major media are also currently "frying" that the riots in Kazakhstan are one of the causes of the bitcoin price falling apart from the news from the FED

After all, the riots that occurred were the result of the government being incompetent in managing the country and not wanting to step down from office

even though kazakhstan is a small country, the whales will definitely take advantage of this opportunity to bring the crypto market down and then buy at a cheap price

15% of the world's hashrate "reserves", in my opinion, can have an impact on the market. But it may not, mining is a bit of a non-standard resource. Indeed, it can simply be redistributed to other farms and not have any effect on the price.

On the other hand, Kazakhstan may become another, rather large point of destabilization in a specific region, which will have an impact on the regional economy, and as a result, some attempt to "sit out in cryptocurrency"

It definitely has an effect; just highly likely to be very insignificant. 15% is quite a good chunk, but it's not like Bitcoin's security is suddenly in danger or something. Something something correlation is not causation.

Why would a drop in hashrate have an impact on the markets at all at this point?

Some say 12% some 18%, let's go with a brought value of 25 Exa, ok?
Marathon group, and, that's one company, not adding Riot, Core , Argo , Hut8 etc, has just placed another order of 78,000  S-19 XP, at the advertised rate its 10 Exa alone bringing their whole orders to 23Exa.

Why should this matter to the markets?
I would have understood a ban, that's cutting a lot of potential investors, users, holders, like the complete mess up in China, yeah that would have consequences (not that large), but to experience a 10% drop in price because of a country with a GDP lower than the county of Maricopa not the whole state of Arizona is ridiculous.


As above, why should it matter? I understand when you cut out a 14 trillion economy from the picture like China, but a 180 billion one is peanuts!

The current conflict in Kazakhstan has quite a big influence on the movement of crypto prices in the market. This will not be finished in a short time. Especially regarding the stability of the government system which is threatened and also has a more severe impact on the economy in the country. Apart from the chaos that has occurred, of course, we hope that this will not make us in the global market also be dragged into it. For a time the impact was felt. Moreover, holders in the crypto market do not really expect this problem to continue for a long time.

Because the problems in Kazakhstan are already global in nature, we automatically have to bear the effects, like the initial risks of the miners who have been established since the era of the Chinese shutdown. The political element is clearly there, because of the geopolitical scale there are parties who deliberately made this coup a topic to be discussed for the United Nations which must take part in it.

Why you mentioned it as an invasion! Army of Russia is trying to occupy the country? As i know current president ask for help from Russia so they send troops to get situation under control. I am not judging that Russia have done that right or wrong but we surely can not say that as an invasion.

Now it became really Messi for bitcoin miners. First china then iran now kazakhstan. They have only 15% of total mining force but still it shake the whole markets.

Isn't Kazakhstan the country where a lot of miners from China fled to after the supposed mining ban? Looking at the hashrates, it seems that the country hasn't stopped hashing that much ever since the unrest began. Perhaps the miners are also situated on provinces just like in China. IMO, this will not significantly impact trading prices on bitcoin, but will surely have some effects on the mining side of things. But even then, the network will just adjust with the absence of the Kazakh-based miners, and perhaps it may not be long before those miners relocate again.

Hashrate junkies always claim this when the price goes down in relation to a drop in hashrate. They love to say that the btc price follows the hashrate. You could also blame this dip on the very hawkish FED we are seeing right now. You could even say this dip is from bitcoin not hitting the 100k mark by the EOY, making all the paper-handed "hodlers" sell their bag.

I made a thread on how bitcoin, crypto and blockchains might avoid internet disabling last year:

Hardened Orbital Blockchain
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5326006.0

The use of satellite based internet coupled with satellite based smartphones can bypass the regional internet if it is disabled. This could provide crucial communications alternatives in state of emergency, natural disaster, war or cyberattack.

Crypto based mining is very mobile, the only real requirements are electricity and an internet connection. They can travel anywhere in the world without much in the way of limitation.

I would be interested to know what happened with the Arab Spring. It seemed like a major movement which was silenced and forgotten without much explanation. It seems that there is an excess of will for positive change around the world. What is lacking is the knowledge and basic information necessary to make it happen. Ironic that information would be the missing ingredient needed to effect real and lasting social change, in an information age.

The ongoing crisis will definitely have an impact on the mining hash rate, as a number of miners had moved their operations from China to Kazakhstan (many more were planning to do so). Anyway, what is happening in Kazakhstan reminds me of the disintegration of the USSR (1992). Until the early 90s, Kazakhstan had a white majority (mostly Russians, but sizable number of Ukrainians, Germans, Poles and Byelorussians). The ethnic composition was 60% white and 40% central Asian. Now the demography is 25% white and 75% central Asian. The productive white population is declining, while the unproductive population is increasing. And the oil prices are also low, and now the government is facing difficulty in subsidizing the unproductive population.

Yea I'm definitely not for the price follows hashrate thing. While we have the so-called "wHaLeS", the markets are still heavily retail-influenced. It's not like the normies watch the hashrate religiously to decide how the markets will move.

And yea, I think the S2F model breaking and not having a blowoff top is quite a bigger effect on market sentiment than hashrate.

The only scenario there is that the government over doesn't want the existence of cryptocurrency, for destruction of mining far to be occur, that means government in the country is  buoyantly not support of the existence of the farm as i portray before, before i got information that those miner's will be living to china, so what holding them, i know those damages that occur during the crisis will lead for degradation of cryptocurrency across the world especially bitcoin in particular, i we don't have to conclude now until we get another vitals information concerning it steps.

Given that this country became one of the major centers of crypto mining, following China's restrictions, it does have significant impact on the market now. I still don't believe that hash rate has a direct impact on the price, but big disruptions to mining which obviously occurred with the Internet being shut down are leading people to panic, and that leads to the price decreasing. Unfortunately, it seems that the Internet is still down, even though I thought the protests were dealt with when foreign military operations started. I think that eventually the Internet will be back, and Bitcoin will recover regardless of when it happens because the mining difficulty will simply adjust and people will calm down.

All the same, this should be regarded as an invasion of the territory of Kazakhstan by foreign troops. According to the Collective Security Treaty, member states of the treaty can ask other participants to provide military assistance only in the event of an external military invasion.
In this case, the President of Kazakhstan did not have the right to ask for military assistance; in order to preserve his power, he violated the Treaty and, in order to resolve internal conflicts, requested the introduction of troops of foreign states into his country.
Russia and other countries that signed the Treaty had to deny the President of Kazakhstan an illegal request. However, it was beneficial for Russia to do this, since in the future Kazakhstan will be completely dependent on Russia. For the entry of 3,000 of his soldiers into Kazakhstan, Putin has already put forward a number of political demands, including the recognition of the legal annexation of Crimea, the construction of Russian military bases on the territory of Kazakhstan, certain benefits for Russian citizens, and others. Therefore, Russia will not withdraw its occupation troops from Kazakhstan at all.
Russia illegally introduced its troops to Kazakhstan and already now does not intend to withdraw them. Isn't this an occupation?

Let me explain:
Kazakhstan, once entered into such an alliance as the CSTO (Collective Security Treaty Organization), which included Kazakhstan, Russia, Belarus, Armenia, and several other countries from the ex-USSR. More precisely, probably so - the former republics entered, where totalitarian or semi-totalitarian rulers remained in power. The essence of the union is the provision of technical and military assistance by all members of the union, in the event of an attack on a country that is a party to this treaty. To attack, according to their fantasies, of course, the United States should or NATO :)
But, article 4 clearly regulates the issue in which cases, ALIEN troops can be involved and arrive on the territory of the participating country. It says so "If one of the participating States is subjected to aggression (an armed attack threatening security, stability, territorial integrity and sovereignty), then this will be considered by the participating States as aggression (an armed attack threatening security, stability, territorial integrity and sovereignty) to all states parties to this Treaty. "
Here is a link to the original - https://odkb-csto.org/documents/documents/dogovor_o_kollektivnoy_bezopasnosti/, and Google translate will perfectly translate into any language.
Those. legal entry of troops is possible only in the event of an attack, or violation of integrity, the threat of loss of sovereignty, etc. cases. INTERNAL contradictions do not apply to such situations. The population, by the way, according to the Constitution of Kazakhstan, the only bearer of power in the country, has the right to solve its internal problems, the power is obliged to react and not suppress free expression of will. Considering the above, this system is an outright invasion, and an attempt to stifle other thoughts, and the desire of people to live well in compliance with norms and laws.

When a nation has been ruled by just one single person for 30 years and it did not have this much impact, sometimes I question why people wake up so late. I mean this has been a global news type of deal, but they were ruled by a dictator for 30 years. Not that they never had any protests back then neither, they had some, but it never got to this point for some reason. Interestingly, this is good to see because politicians need to realize that there is a limit to their corruption, all over the world.

You can be corrupt and steal as a politician because that is literally what we come to expect from every single politician, which means that if you do it small enough then people will be fine because they expect you to steal money from them when you decide to be politician. Sad situation but it is the reality, however if you go too far then you will have protests like these.

This is what I was just thinking when I read about what is going on there.
And all those miners from China moved their equipment there and needing to shut them off due to a struggle for the power to drive these businesses is just another thing upon itself towards the battle of bitcoin hashrate for countries.
Maybe it wasn't a good idea to have the majority of the hashrate designated to one region especially that has a history of upheaval in its own government.
First the internet was shut-off then they cut the power.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/06/kazakhstan-bitcoin-internet-shutdown
https://www.reuters.com/markets/europe/bitcoin-network-power-slumps-kazakhstan-crackdown-hits-crypto-miners-2022-01-06

A lot of miners shifted their operations from China to Kazakhstan because of the extremely low electricity prices and the ease of transporting the equipment between the two countries. But now they need to look for additional options. Russia and Kyrgyzstan are countries with similar advantages, but once again both can be described as politically unstable. If the operations are moved to countries such as Mongolia and Vietnam, the bureaucracy and red tape kicks in. In other East Asian nations, the electricity prices and taxes are too high to keep the mining operations profitable. In simple words, the miners are caught between the devil and the deep sea.

What could miners do in Mongolia?
Put some rugs in every home and generate enough static energy for 4 hashes a day?
An s19 burns around 2400kwh a month, the total energy production of Mongolia is 5 Twh, even assuming the best performing gear would make all of the hashrate the entire power production of the entire country could only host 10% of the hashrate.
Kyrgyzstan has 10Twh a year, what could you host there to now affect the normal consumption?


On what tv station or newspaper do you check the oil prices?
Are they from this planet or Mars?

For a country that has gained its independence just a few decades ago, sad to see it's not working for them. The government has not established a central intelligence to see this coming. Who benefits from this insurgence to remove the president?  Could it be the US to divide and weaken Russia?

The country is in the middle of Russia and China if these two big superpowers are behind this, they really plotted it well to unite a bigger empire to rule us all. Kazakstan is very important to China and Russia because of thier Silkroad project. And just a day ago I read the news China is sending troops into the country.

I think you have to look at China and what happened when they banned Bitcoin mining to answer your question. The moment when the mainstream media started to distribute the news that China banned Bitcoin, the Bitcoin price dropped significantly ...but it recovered soon after that... because the world saw that a Bitcoin mining ban did not destroy Bitcoin mining.

You should remember that China had most of the hashing power in the world at the time, so the impact was supposed to be devastating. So, Bitcoin mining in Kazakhstan has +/- 15% of all the hashing power in the world.... and that is significantly lower than the hashing power that China had.

My prediction.... The Bitcoin price will take a small drop and it will bounce back.... and the miners in Kazakhstan will probably just move some of their operations to Bitcoin friendly countries.  ;)

It has a huge impact on the world economy since 15% is such a huge percentage but I don't think it would affect crypto that much. It might affect Bitcoin and other altcoins a little but I guess it could still recover fast. The situation of Kazakhstan is getting worse and I hardly believe that the main problem is their leader. I hope that things would get better for them because lots of innocent people are suffering.

It's so unfortunate to see what's happening in there even more unfortunate to witness, I wonder what people might be thinking, as a matter of fact they might be using cryptocurrencies like bitcoins as an escape, the government is done for and the troops are unnecessary!! Where is the UN when the attention is needed? There would definitely be a huge impact hands down, since the situation is not improving we might see the hash rate going down pretty soon, with the low hash rate, other countries will recover this  soon enough but the what we should be talking about is how the cryptos can help them during the crisis, the cryptos are not controlled by any government, cryptos like bitcoins there in few months, this might be a very important asset for them. Hope things get better with them soon.

Since the independence from the Soviet Union the ruling party is in power. Anything or any party against the ruling party agenda were oppressed. This is the reason behind the protests that has caused the death of 164 people. The real reason for the ongoing violence is the leader. People always look for a change, already the leader is on the throne for about 30+ years. After these many years people expecting for a change is common mentality of any human.

That means that country is still influenced by Russia. But why did people start protesting after that long? Why they didn't do that in these 30 years? First middle east now this part. It seems like we are going to see another cold war between two superpowers.

Miners have made a bad decision by moving into this country after china's ban on BTC mining. Internet shut down, more troops are coming from Russia tension is high. Can we see another situation like Ukraine?

In the regional economy, it doesn't look too good. If it turns into years of destabilization (and it very well could), then that will in turn not just halt economic progress, but also reverse it. As for crypto, It could be a small setback, but as crypto has no country of its own, it will just find a new home as it always has. I'm just more worried about the people than I am about crypto. There is nothing wrong with revolution, it is just that it brings about unavoidable deaths. As for crypto miners, there will always be smaller underdeveloped countries that will, for a time being, welcome them with open arms.

Crypto miners were primarily guided by the fact that electricity is cheap and that the location is close enough to have lower relocation costs. Obviously, no one could have predicted that the political situation would change in such a dramatic way, but it is a risk that always exists.

What has Ukraine got to do with this? The Kazakh government has called on the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), which is something like NATO, to help it in its efforts to regain control of the country.  It is not about any occupation, but military assistance according to pre-agreed agreements.

Yeah, just like the invasion of Hungary or the Prague Spring, they are all covered by treaties to help protect, the ones in power not the country. I wonder if Serbia had used such a treaty to allow Russia to support and invade Croatia to regain control of the country, what would your opinion about it be  ;)




I don't know, why did it take French peasants centuries to start a revolution, why did communist regimes fall after 40 years, it simply a matter of when the glass becomes full, and if you rise fuel pries by 100% while the country is racking billions in gas and oil exports then you have it.
As for superpowers, what is the second superpower in this cold war? I know one is the US but who is the other "superpower"?


If you think that this is a US operation then please explain why the current leader who is backed by Russia is arresting every former high-rank official that is tied to the previous leader, Nazarbayev, who, let me quote:
"created a state on a territory that never had a state ... Kazakhs never had any statehood, he has created it". Guess who I quoted here?
Hint, it starts with Vladimir and it ends with Putin!  ;D

Let's see how long it takes until the Russian armies will go home (at least the visible ones). It is known that the Red Army comes easily "to help out" in a country, but it cannot be convinced too easy to also leave.
However, I expect another Belarus there, not another Ukraine.

---
And about the impact on crypto... the hash rate looks good (it didn't actually drop as much as some claimed) and the news of the day tell that the internet is partly restored too.

I would not agree that it is the same thing, the disintegration of Yugoslavia is something completely different. In addition, Russia has tried to find a peaceful solution to the conflict, while the UK and some other Western European countries have supported Serbia in quelling the insurgency in any way. But even if the Russians came to the aid of their Orthodox brothers by some chance, they would not have had a good time in Croatia, I am sure.

The agreement that the countries of the former Soviet bloc have is something completely normal for me - regardless of the fact that it is now used in this way.

I would say that putting miners in a place with a dictator at the top was a bad decision anyway. I mean even if there were no protests, even if life went on like nothing happened, what would happen if dictator came out and said "we are closing down all miners" like china did?

In most democratic places that's a whole due process that takes years to be put in law, you do not get executive orders in USA about miners, it's for much more serious stuff. All in all that means we are talking about something that is dangerously risky to put all of those equipment in a nation where there is a dictator and if they didn't see this one coming, they could have seen something else coming as long as they knew that it was just purely a dangerous thing.

This is why I have to say that miners are at fault here, they could have taken it to places like Canada or Iceland and both take advantage of the weather, and also the energy subsidaries and build their own solar panel or wind panel systems and got it for free with a great democracy.

No, you are not telling the truth, either not owning the information, or deliberately distorting it.

1. Article 4 of the CSTO clearly regulates the issue in which cases the troops of the participating countries can be involved and arrive on the territory of the participating country. Again, I will quote the original article:
If one of the participating states is subjected to aggression (an armed attack threatening security, stability, territorial integrity and sovereignty), then this will be considered by the participating states as aggression (an armed attack threatening security, stability, territorial integrity and sovereignty) against all states - parties to this Treaty. ". The situation in Kazakhstan is an internal contradiction between citizens and the authorities. The issues were purely economic, and related to freedoms.
2. At the moment, the President of Kazakhstan says that the troops will stay for another 2 weeks. To which the head of the Russian mission declares that the Russian troops will be on the territory of Kazakhstan until they decide that the conflict is settled, but for now they, OCCUPIED, will protect the most important / for Russia / infrastructure facilities. That is, the desire of the president who called them is no longer of interest to anyone - Russia decides how many of its troops will be on the territory of another country !!!

With every passing day, I am being reminded of the movie Borat.  ;D

Feels bad for the people from countries such as Russia, Belarus, Turkey, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan. Those who live in these countries have no real sense of freedom, and are being ruled by dictators. All these countries are resource rich, but the ordinary people are living in extreme poverty, thanks to the loot by these dictators. At this point, I don't know who will replace these people if they are kicked out of power. But anyone would be better than these dictators like Putin, Lukashenko, Erdoğan, Nazarbayev and Aliyev.

This means that one of the problems that caused the price of bitcoin to fall because of the impact of the political war in kazakstan as one of the world's largest bitcoin miners so that the bitcoin ecosystem was disrupted and caused investors to panic.
Is that true.?

In this topic, we are trying to understand whether the crisis in this country (Kazakhstan), which owns 15% of mining capacity, could lead to a drop in the bitcoin rate, and generally affect the cryptocurrency market. Above are some of the arguments for and against this idea.