Kazakhstan Crackdown Hits Crypto Miners
The price of Bitcoin has fallen more than 15% in the last month and that trend continued Thursday with the digital coin price coming in just under 43,000.
The news continues to be grim with Kazakhstan announcing a crackdown that has hit Bitcoin miners due to the shutdown of the Internet in that nation.
And the impact in abroad has been significant. Kazakhstan became last year the world's second-largest centre for bitcoin mining after the United States.
Russia sent paratroopers into Kazakhstan on Thursday to help put down the countrywide uprising after violence spread across the tightly controlled former Soviet state. Police said they had killed dozens of rioters in the main city Almaty, while state television said 13 members of the security forces had died.
The internet was on Wednesday shut down across the country in what monitoring site Netblocks called "a nation-scale internet blackout".
Bitcoin and other cryptocurrenices are created or "mined" by high-powered computers, usually at data centres in different parts of the world, which compete to solve complex mathematical puzzles in a highly energy-intensive process.
Bitcoin represents upwards of 80% of all online gambling transactions in restricted markets.
- Aaron Goldstein, Gambling911.com
