Bitcoin Forum

China hasn't been exactly crypto-friendly, sending mixed signals for years. But recently, it has been quite straightforward and not friendly towards crypto miners. It started with Inner Mongolia's mining restrictions (https://www.reuters.com/technology/chinas-inner-mongolia-escalates-crackdown-cryptomining-2021-05-25/), but is now spreading to other regions, such as Sichuan (https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20210621-china-broadens-crackdown-on-crypto-mining-industry).
Nevertheless, it seems that mining is still done predominantly in China (https://www.statista.com/statistics/1200477/bitcoin-mining-by-country/). Why is that so?
The first thing that always comes up as an answer is cheap electricity, but is it that cheap and a good enough reason to do business in a country with an authoritarian regime and hostile attitude towards Bitcoin? The electricity rate in China is certainly lower than in most of the EU, but there seem to be tons of countries with even lower electricity rates, some of which seem like viable options for mining farms (Ukraine, Georgia, Turkey etc.). So why is China still the #1 country for miners if there are other options and if China isn't that great?

It isn't that mining in China suddenly isn't "great", it's that the CCP is outlawing mining. And the reason why there are still miners operating in China, apparently it's because even though a huge percentage already shut down and started moving, it's a gradual process, not something that happens in a snap of a finger.

Also, I've heard that smaller miners in China are managing to stay under the radar. (obviously due to far lower energy use compared to the goliaths)

Yes, that *was* the 1st answer. The 2nd is that the people creating and running the mining operations in China are <drum roll please> Chinese, which of course made it a natural choice to base their operations there.

Up until recent events, China had been more or less rather friendly towards crypto mining. The crackdowns in earlier years were all aimed at getting rid of scammers involved in the rampant flood of ICO/Token crapcoin pump & dump schemes.

It's not easy for them to just stop their operations because some of the places have been stopped by the government. They're probably are waiting for them to get a flag until they move. They also might have their plan Bs already if ever they're the next to be stopped by the CCP.
As long as they're not yet flagged down, there's no reason for them to move and shipping to other places or likely another country, they don't like it and it needs a lot of effort to do.

Give it time and everything will definitely happen. It is clear that transferring a large farm is not as easy and fast as it might seem. The main thing is to understand exactly where you want to move and where you can be sure that this new place will not have the same problems as they received in China. If there are guarantees, clear rules - and there are, of course, such places, then everything will soon be restored, and China will lose its dominant position in production.

Also one must note that the ban on mining does NOT include a ban on making miners. Bitmain, Canaan et al are still free to keep on making the hardware for sale to the rest of the world. The hardware just cannot be sold for use in China.

 As for the large mining farms which were mostly based in China, they just have to move the hardware end of operations out of the country. As I said earlier, they also will now have to use exchanges and banks that are based in other countries to reap their rewards.

Prior to the ban, you could say the number of miners in China was high for one reason such as cheap electricity, but that's not the reason why mining is still done in China in a large scale. After having established any business, it becomes difficult to change location immediately, and that's also applicable to the mining industry, you do not just expect those miners to change their locations so easily, it'd take quite a lot of logistics, that'll by extension take some time.

And having said that, the miners could also be closely monitoring the situation, maybe to see if the Chinese government would change it's stand on their decision regarding mining in China.

Bitmain just announced that they're halting sales.

It seems to me that the data has not been updated yet, because the problem arose recently
I saw a link to this article
BIT Mining Successfully Delivers Mining Machines to Kazakhstan
https://ir.btc.com/2021-06-21-BIT-Mining-Successfully-Delivers-Mining-Machines-to-Kazakhstan
Any move to another country will incur transportation costs and taxes on the import of equipment.

The first mistake is to look at that table that gets really really annoying and talk about national electric price averages!
There is no such thing as the electricity price in the US, nobody (well maybe some random 1%) pays the average, once you break down states is like this:
https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.php?t=epmt_5_6_a
Then you go one step further and look at prices per county. Then one more step and grab a nice deal within that county, better than the average there!

Do you think miners in China were mining at 10c/kWh? No way in hell!

Second thing is that as NotFuzzyWarm said, they are Chinese, you obviously want to run your business in your own country not seek residency and permit, and all the other stuff in some foreign country with all their laws.

And third, regulations! It's one thing to run a mining farm in China, where you can do your own wiring and not care about inspections, and a different thing to try this shit in the EU. By the time you finish with the paperwork you two more halving have occurred and Bitmain is already at S61 with the gear. And all this paperwork costs money, money, and time which are essential.

Mining farms have not moved away previously because there was no incentive to move, if someone would have offered them no regulations, zero tax, 1cent/kwh unlimited power, and free citizenship they would have moved a long time ago, but that was not the case! Bitmain tried to expand its business in the US with multiple projects, it wasn't that easy as they probably imagined!

You cannot expect huge miners to move out of the country in an instant and try to use their gear almost immediately. There are a lot of things involved in moving from point A, where you initially established your facilities, platform, etc., to point B, where you need to secure licenses, permit to operate and all that laborious process involved in hosting, running, and managing a warehouse that is potentially dangerous if not all safety requirements were met. There's just a ton of hassle and hurdles that a mining operator will face if they are forced to move due to regulations and the bans that it's more logical to sell the equipment rather than start over again.

And on top of that you need someone who knows local laws and speaks local language well enough to understand technicalities. Probably half of the citizens of every EU country have no idea of the laws and requirements to start a business and wouldn't know what permits are for what and which of them have to be filed where and at what deadline.
Starting a business abroad is hard even if you speak English, which is supposed to be the universal language.

Miners are concentrated in regions which would net them the most profits, factors are but not limited to: cost of labour, electrical costs, cost of landspace, cost of shipping and setting up the ASICs. Higher energy surplus, vast availability of land space, etc. It isn't hard to see why China is such a great place.

They haven't really done anything to the miners until quite recently. Even then the crackdowns were justified to be for the environment and not against Bitcoin.

And right now, I believe those big miners in China are making a deal or arrangement to its government.
We don't know their internal communication regarding bitcoin mining, but if their government is really hard on them, I guess, they have stopped a long time ago.
But if they are still in business, it means, they found a way how to get around their government regulations.
And yes, it is not easy to move to another country, as there are other factors to consider like their citizenship, permits, transpo and others.

Up to a point everything was fine with mining in China, that's why people went for it, no one expected (at least in the nearest future) these actions from the government. In addition, I don't think that many people intentionally moved to China to mine, that wouldn't make much sense when you can simply join the pool from wherever you want.

So I'm guessing most of these people are Chinese, they have families, maybe steady jobs, a certain way of life, they mined in China because it was comparatively easy, so I don't think they would move someplace else just for the purpose of mining.

Right now, as push comes to shove some miners will move, but it will take time.

Turkey doesn't seem like a particularly good plan, considering that just recently the central bank in Turkey banned the use of crypto (https://www.euronews.com/next/2021/04/16/turkey-has-just-banned-the-use-of-cryptocurrencies-and-bitcoin-is-already-feeling-the-stra), they have a certain opposition against crypto in the government too, who knows what will be next.  

I have seen news reports that some mines seem to be relocating, but I think most miners are actually reluctant to leave, because relocation of mines requires a lot of money and manpower. China has issued a ban to not allow mining, but it may not rule out that they will be in China. Under the supervision and control of the Communist Party, some mines belonging to the government are reserved for their use.

Source?
Nothing about it on the official Bitmain news site (https://blog.bitmain.com/en/category/bitmain-news/).

What might be more confusing is what is there to gain for China if they ban cryptocoin mining? It is making them have less control over the cryptocoin mining industry. I speculate these strict policies are temporary.

are u guys aren't tired with this  :'( :'( :'(

because news from china bitcoin its like money from monopoly game   :-\


but i heard that miner from china is moving to texas https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/17/chinese-crackdown-leads-bitcoin-miners-to-texas-and-florida.html

https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/chinese-crackdown%3A-bitmain-stops-rig-sales-exodus-ensues-hash-rate-declines-2021-06-23


Translation: Bitmain secretly owned the majority of those rigs that were shut down and now need to sell them.  :P  IMO.

Which could be one of the reasons why some of them are not yet packing up and leaving. There might still be ongoing negotiations happening in the background right now away from the public eyes. After all, these companies are mostly run by people who are also Chinese. The hardware they are using are also owned and manufactured in the same country. So there's probably a reason to believe that some of these mining farms are still hoping that they could stay and run their operations using cheap Chinese electricty.

Link please.

This would be interesting.

Maybe read the 1st page  :D

Perhaps for the same reason some people hate changes! I can already tell that majority who are minners in China are Chinese who probably have not or only left their country on a few occasions to visit other countries, moving completely to a different country to resettle would not be exactly easy for them to do, not to mention all the legal procedures they have to follow to settle in another country, and that will mean like starting afresh, it is not as easy as you think probably the reason why they are still staying back and enduring all the ill-treatment from their government.

So what if Bitmain does cut back on spot-market sales of new gear? Safe bet that Canaan, Innosilicon, and MicroBt won't and will be quite happy with their increased sales of new gear. Temporarily halting spot-market sales (read as: individual or very small volume sales) does not mean they will slow down on large-volume sales to mega farms in other parts of the globe. In my book it is a win-win all around for buyers and other miner manufacturers.

Maybe there was another reason other than cheap electricity, I think maybe because of the large population in China and with the existence of an authoritarian communist regime there are a lot of people suffering from poverty and Bitcoin provides them with a great and easy way to make big profit while achieving financial freedom, it is not the Chinese government that does the mining but The Chinese people, they must have a lot of reasons why they should be upset about mining in China despite the restrictions and bans imposed by the Chinese government.
Another additional reason may be due to the presence of most of the mining equipment manufacturers in China, which makes it easy to obtain them at cheaper prices than the rest of the countries, and this also helps the spread of these devices widely in China, unlike other countries that can impose severe customs restrictions on the import of such devices.

probably because we just can't trust the news coming out on every news site. this china bitcoin ban had been used as fud several times and because it always works to drag the price down, its still does even after 2017. the recent bitcoin china ban was just the same news it's just revived. this time its mining that is targeted.

despite the news that miners are going to the US today. in the coming years, we still will see this news again.  it just means that we really give importance to China like it dictates the prices which even the western media are publishing the news on mainstream.

I seriously doubt that this news is true because US isn't known to be very kind to other countries specially China, one has to be really stupid to live in China and still move their business to US that can decide they want to seize it overnight just because there is some conflict between the two governments.
If you check the news you can see that some miners are already moving to nearly places like Kazakhstan.

If they stop selling gear to try to keep the price high for miners it's probably the first time they do a really stupid move that would hurt them long-term. The only real explanation for this would be that they have tons of gear they don't plan on redeploying by themselves and that their lastest batch didn't sell that well but halting sales wouldn't magically make old s9 worth again 1000$, they are letting others gain the upper hand in future sales, what would be the point of that?

Who do they think they are, Saudi Arabia trying to control oil?

But, if this is real it means older gear is trading now at scrape prices there, have to check some offers!   ;D

I think one of the reasons is that the people who operate it are on a bad reputation on their citizenship program where you are awarded or deducted in points depending on what you do everyday and those points I think is operational all over the mainland and one of the perks of a good citizen is you don't have to worry about going overseas or stuff. Maybe that might be the reason why miners can't get out and probably they are harassed by the police.

https://twitter.com/onlyyoontv/status/1406911193126785026

0.03 $ electricity in Russia Irkutsk

I think I see the fresh news from today (translated news shared from my local groups) that some are leaving in these weeks, BUT actually they are also getting some business compensation for loss of business during lack operations, not sure how it works but it does appear that they are leaving not on bad terms.

$30k to transport everything SO cheap!

Of course, moving businesses takes time, but the situation has been unstable for a couple of years, so there was plenty of time to start the process. And when mining is outlawed, I think it qualifies as a situation which isn't great for mining business.
Damn, I can't believe I didn't think of this  ;D If that's the case, of course they're trying to stay in their own country. Then again, it doesn't explain why miners are largely Chinese (I mean, why people from other countries didn't get that interested in mining).
Of course, moving to the US or the EU is difficult, which is why I've mentioned different countries in the post. As for electricity rates, there are indeed some significant things to account for that the average data doesn't show.

it could be that what you say is a fact and we cannot deny that almost in all countries there will certainly be those who use it for unwise interests. so that in the end it must be found a way not to be misused and actually detrimental to the interests of the state. maybe it's not just China that has experienced this, but it's only the level that makes the difference why the Chinese government finally did that, maybe because it was already intolerable and had to be repaired.

They see bitcoin as competition for the their own digital currency and they are trying to meet strict environmental emission guidelines.

Miners in China are no longer just personal miner . This is starting a big company and these companies use high power. and there are also those who assume the atmosphere is hot there / global warming. and also in some eceonomic statement their assume their print their own money without limit. thats why the government started investigating illegal company there.

And each comes with a flaw.

Look at the alternatives they have from the start, Iran, a totalitarian regime even worse than the CCP, Russia, with the same one one-party rule, as you probably know what happens to opposition there, the same attitude towards crypto, ban/unban/ban, the former soviet states, all corrupt where the politicians will do anything for money and when you stop contributing they start extorting you. Turkey? Lol. Georgia? Net oil and gas importer with 30% of the energy generated by gas! Not the place that will welcome you with open arms unless you pay your share to the government like Bitfury does, and do you think they will welcome competition?

No, their obvious choice is clear, you need a country with insane power capacity, where even 10GW would mean nothing, one where you can blend in, one with cheap power in some regions, and one which is a lot more predictable. And there is only one left in this world, that's why we see a lot of them moving to the US. And it will take a while.


Not only in China but all over the world. Personal miners are a dying breed, home mining is also dead for a long time, plug in two s19 in your one-bedroom apartment and let's see what happens. You can't get good rates anywhere unless you're a company, a registered business, while there are a few exceptions the amount of hashing power in their hands is negligible.

There would be lots of considerations to be taken first before moving out into other country just for the sake of mining.

1. Passport/Visa
2. Adaptation on new surroundings
3. Some legal reasons
4. Not all are that financially capabled.
5. Lots of adjustments and arrangements to be done.

This is why some of them opt out on selling their rigs instead of going all of the hassle that they would experienced on making such decision.
So it isn't really simple as it sounds honestly.

The Chinese government appeared to only target the largest mining farms. According to some people from the cryptospace industry based in China, the government left alone small and medium sized miners. They also left alone Ethereum miners and Chia and Filecoin miners.

Have you seen the largest mining farms? They are very massive.

https://i.ibb.co/FsGztZ0/C8-BC86-C4-AA49-49-C2-B4-EC-930142-CBE8-AA.jpg

Look at that building that used to be full of Asics. Those types of mining farms is Beijing’s target.

Also, I speculate that all the strict policies might be for their preparation of their July 1 celebration of the 100th year anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party. The same policies might not be enforced strictly after that date slowly hehe.

If it's true that the reason behind of the declined from china is because of having cheap electricity perhaps they already eliminate that mining activity even before. How comes it's happening right now wherein mining bitcoin become more interesting than before.? They're really making jokes here.. Or maybe just an excuses because they have another plan for it?