We did not have to wait for Kazakhstan to do that, of course.

It seems that the recent riots in Kazakhstan are due at least parts of them is strictly linked to the “mining” processes of the cryptocurrency called Bitcoin. On one side, it seems that the arrival in Kazakhstan of many Bitcoin mining datacenters forced to leave China has increased the overall energy consumption of the whole country enough to push the government to raise energy prices, which in turn contributed to cause the riots.

On the opposite side, which I find more interesting and is the point of this post, there are the effect of Kazakhstan events on Bitcoin. The exact extent to which the arrival of Bitcoin miners actually contributed to start the riots is not clear (not to me, at least). But one of the concrete effects of the riots was a government-mandated internet shutdown that, besides making it harder for rioters to coordinate,

• made it impossible for the Kazakhstan-based bitcoint miners to communicate with the rest of the world…
• thus sensibly reducing (I’ve read as much as 14%) the processing power of the global* distributed ledger of all Bitcoin transactions…
• thus greatly slowing all Bitcoin transactions, all over the world

Cyberspace, this is not

Regardless of how things will end up in Kazakhstan, and sincerely wishing the best to all Kazakh people… the specific effect of the riots that I summarized above is great. Maybe Bitcoin or its successors will save the world, or maybe they wont. That is another issue.

In both cases, the effects on Bitcoin of the riots in a place many “First World” residents could not locate on a map if their life depended on it are another wonderful, perfect reminder that there is no separate “cyberspace”. There is no digital utopia where digitally savvy people live and trade, untouched by the miseries of the one, real world. We are all in this together, with or without cryptocurrencies.