Not since the the fall of the USSR has Kazakhstan seen street protests at this level, not even in 2011, 2016, or 2018–2020.

The current crisis is linked to the government’s decision to raise prices of liquified petroleum gas (LPG) two-fold to about 100 tenge (0.23 USD) per liter.

After an economically excruciating pandemic, people have been hurting. This price gouge was the last straw.

Although the protests started in oil-rich Zhanaozen, the site of an infamous massacre in 2011 perpetrated by security forces, they quickly spread across the country.

They’ve gotten so large that the autocratic president, Mr. Tokayev, has called upon the Collective Security Treaty Organization, a sort of post-Soviet NATO, to crush the dissent.

I cannot help but wonder, however, if there is a link between Bitcoin and these current energy-related protests.

Ever since cryptocurrency mining has become more and more restricted, as when China shut them out, many miners moved across the border to Kazakhstan.

Did proof-of-work crypto mining such as used for Bitcoin and Ethereum play a role in Kazakhstan’s unprecedented political crisis?

Kazakhstan since then has become the world’s second country in mining, after the United States, with about an 18.1% share.

Likewise, energy consumption in Kazakhstan since the start of 2021 increased 8 percent as opposed to a more normal 2 percent average.

This all seems a little bit too coincidental for me. Just as more energy is being used, prices go up, sparking protests.

Then again, it is merely speculative.

I have also heard that Kazakhstan’s mining is done from environmentally-unfriendly coal-fired power plants but the prices that went up, as far as I am aware, concerned liquified petroleum gas and not coal.

I’d love to hear others’ takes on this.

Perhaps I am looking for something where there is nothing, or not anything along those lines.