Key Highlights
- 20 to Jan.
- 30, 2026 (Source: CoinWarz)The fact that the sharpest drop came from Foundry USA, the largest mining pool with the largest presence in the US, tells you that the drop was caused by curtailments. Graph showing the 30-day distribution of Bitcoin's hashrate by mining pools on Jan.
- 30, 2026 (Source: Hashrate Index)Why can so many miners now shut off quickly?
- Why would they ever choose to do it, and what do those choices mean for Bitcoin’s security budget, transaction flow, and the politics of plugging a large industrial load into a grid that can get stressed in extreme cold?Curtailment 101: miners as flexible load, not fragile infrastructureWhile curtailment is simple in definition, it's kind of messy in practice.
- At the simplest level, it's miners reducing electricity consumption, either partially or fully, because power is scarce, expensive, or contractually more valuable to sell back to the grid than to burn through ASICs. In the US, and especially in Texas, that choice has matured into a full-blown business model.
