One metric is far more important to bitcoin users than its price

 

While the bitcoin and bitcoin cash price action is exciting, investors in either would do well to pay attention to another critical metric: the amount of computational power committed to mining each digital coin, also known as the hash rate. A steep and prolonged drop in bitcoin’s hash rate could set off a much-feared “chain death spiral” that could render the bitcoin network useless. Bitcoin showed signs of its potential for triggering this dynamic over the weekend, when its hash rate fell by 50%.