Bitcoin has had a roller coaster of a year with dizzying high prices, record slumps, increased popularity and more hostile regulations. One of these events was China’s complete ban on Bitcoin mining, and other activities related to cryptocurrencies, which took more than half of the world’s Bitcoin miners offline.

However, less than six months later, the global hash rate of Bitcoin has already bounced back. According to data from blockchain.com, Bitcoin’s hash rate has not only made a complete recovery but is now higher than what it was before China’s ban. The cryptocurrency’s total hash rate in terahashes per second (TH/s) is up by 113 percent in the last five months.

What is hash rate?

Hash rate refers to the amount of computing power per second needed to mine Bitcoin. Mining devices need to conduct millions of calculations and get only limited success. Each of these calculations is called hashes, and millions of them happen every second across the globe.

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As the computing power being used to mine Bitcoin increases, so does the hash rate of the network. The higher the hash rate, the more popular a cryptocurrency token is, and the harder it is to mine a single token. Currently, Bitcoin’s hash rate stands above 180 million TH/s or 180 million trillion calculations are made every second.

What does this mean?

As China used to be home to more than half of the world’s Bitcoin miners, it was expected that China’s wide-ranging ban would have a significant long-term impact on the crypto’s hash rate. But miners quickly shifted their operations to countries like the US, which provide cheap clean electricity and few regulatory hurdles, and Kazakstan, where electricity is cheaper still but at the cost of significant emissions.

Many experts and advocates of cryptocurrencies highlight that the Bitcoin network is strong enough to quickly recover from a ban from a superpower that was home to most of the network at one point.

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“Bitcoin withstood a nation-state attack of China actually banning mining, and the network shrugged it off,” said Kevin Zhang of digital currency firm Foundry, which helped bring over $400 million of mining equipment into North America.

“The bitcoin network withstood an attack by a major superpower and emerged stronger than ever six short months later. How can anyone ever argue, ‘But what if nations ban it?’ again?” added bitcoin mining engineer Brandon Arvanaghi.

Meanwhile, the recovery of the hash rate may help Bitcoin pare some of the losses that it has made over the past month. The world’s biggest cryptocurrency was down nearly 30 percent over the past month. The current Bitcoin price stood at $47,922.30.

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