Bitcoin Network’s hash rate dropped drastically on 24 September 2019 under somewhat mysterious circumstances with a drop from 98 million TH/S to 57.7 million TH/S within a matter of hours.

Source: blockchain.com

This 1-year graph shows that on September 23, a huge downtick was observed on the Bitcoin hash rate on September 23rd. This drop was so big that the it immediately sparked discussion among industry stakeholders and general public alike regarding what triggered it in the first place.

There were different reasons presented by experts and commentators. According to one Jeff Brandt, the move coincided with an update released by mining manufacturer Bitmain on its popular S9 miners. The update was needed to cater for the upcoming difficulty increase of the Bitcoin network.

However, an entirely different opinion came from Christopher Bendiksen, a digital asset manager at CoinShares. He believed that the Bitcoin hash rate is not measured in an empirical way and that it can only be estimated from previous block intervals and if several slow blocks occur, the estimates can suffer a downward spike effect. The same can happen in the other direction and that may be the case as well.

But, this was no way close to the biggest downtick in the history of Bitcoin. Back in November 2017, the network apparently lost 50% in its value as fears emerged that miners could shift to the then-new Bitcoin Cash fork instead of Bitcoin itself.

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