Nobody noticed at first.

A few minutes of delay, then an hour.

Then... panic.

99% of the hash rate vanished like breath on a mirror.

For years, critics warned it wasn’t smart to let one country manufacture almost all mining hardware.

The response was always the same: cheap, fast, efficient.

Until someone flipped the switch.

A backdoor.

Buried deep in the hardware.

What made it worse—almost poetic—was the timing.

The difficulty adjustment had locked in minutes before the crash, recalibrated for a world that no longer existed.

With only a fraction of the hash rate remaining, blocks now arrived almost 16 hours between each one.

It would take almost 4 years to reach the next difficulty adjustment.

The network didn’t die.

It staggered.

Crawling forward, one block at a time.

Too slow for commerce, too alive to bury.

And somewhere, in the hum of a forgotten basement, one old rig kept hashing.

Like a candle in a blackout.

#bitcoin #btc #hashrate