On the 5th of January 2022, Kazahstan answered this question. On this day, the Kazakhstan government has increased prices on gas 2x, leading to protests which caused the government to shutdown Kazakh internet for 7 hours.
18.10% of the world hash rate is in Kazakhstan, according to https://ccaf.io/cbeci/mining_map. In other words, 18.10% of the hash rate has vanished from the BTC network.
VP of Research at The Block also found that the drop in hash rate was 12%.
Larry Cermak@lawmaster
Internet has been down in Kazahstan for a few hours where roughly 18% if Bitcoin's hashrate is.
Looks like the impact on the hashrate is so far 12% drop just in the last few hours since internet went down.16:23 PM - 05 Jan 2022
So we predict that the same number of BTC transactions will go through a smaller number of nodes; thus, BTC transaction fees will go up.
Let's double-check it with Glassnode data and indeed the fees have went up.
How does it affect the BTC price?
Unfortunately, I don't know. BTC prices went down today, but the stock market also fell. It seems unlikely to be related to Kazahstan events and BTC fees. Some say that the fall in BTC and the stock market is related to the US government's announcement of interest rate hikes.
TLDR: If hashrate disappears, fees go up 🤷
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