What Happens If China Bans Bitcoin Mining?

[santiagomaicon]

China is already try to ban crypto and nothing changed. I dont think that they are going to really change something

[darkangel11]

If China bans bitcoin mining inside their political jurisdiction then the mining farms in their area will just transfer to another country to mine. Bitcoin data centers have already a taste of how profitable bitcoin mining is and will not be stopped even if the state will not allowed them to mine. They will simply transfer their equipment and facilities out of China and continue to mine. Bitcoin mining is unstoppable except if all bitcoin blocks have been mined.

You are right. The same thing that all exchanges did when China no longer allowed banks to process transactions. Some went bankrupt and the rest moved somewhere else like Hong Kong. Mining in China is cheap so if the cost goes up the cost of the product will also go up. You can't expect someone to sell you Bitcoin for 7k if the cost of mining is 8.
If it happens it will only prove that the market can regulate itself.

[wxxyrqa]

The Chinese government wants to ban cryptocurrency mining based on its research, which shows that they can harm their economy.  Many analysts say that bitcoin mining is very energy-consuming and consumes almost 0, 5% of all electricity in the world.  But given that almost 60-80 percent of all capacity is located in China, it seems to me that most of the load on the energy system is received by China.  Based on the fact that cryptocurrency has somehow risen in price since the time of 2015, and the Chinese state has not received any income from mining, and therefore cryptocurrency mining will cause dissatisfaction with the government, since cryptocurrencies are still unregulated and the Chinese government will not be able to control the production of cryptocurrencies in order to receive  some kind of benefit.

[Artemis3]

Yes. They might banned the mining but still there is no effect in the price and demand as  per me. They can do anything they want, we don't need China, we do have a lot of miners out there. But for sure China just doing that to manipulate and make people panic but in fact they are holding a lot of it.

There is huge difference when you say China holding bitcoin and the people holding bitcoin, if the Chinese government is holding the coins they they will not impose these restrictions and as far as i know there is no mining ban in China but trading and using bitcoin in China is not possible for the past two years, you cannot shut down the entire mining farms in China in a day and expect nothing will happen, there will be a huge network issue if they force the exchanges to shut everything in a day but i do not think it will happen.

If they shutdown all the mining farms, the network will have slow transactions for a while, depending where it is at the regular 2016 block difficulty adjusts, which usually takes about two weeks. When the diff adjusts, everything is back to normal, so no Bitcoin doesn't really mind, its been designed around that.

Shutting down exchanges and farms, of course affects the people involved, they are losing their source of income. But on a global scale, it matters little. Again Bitcoin doesn't care if there are a 100 miners or a 100 million miners, and certainly doesn't care if exchanges exist at all. This is an out of Bitcoin thing that is convenient for non miner people wanting to acquire bitcoin with the only kind of money they have: fiat. If they somehow got altcoins, they can dex p2p exchange those for bitcoin, without the need for centralized exchanges anywhere.

To answer OP question: What happens? Not much really. Just a temporary slowdown of transactions, that's it. It has happened before...

[pixie85]

Not much really! Only the price will tank to test the previous bear market low or maybe even go deeper

A ban is always a big hit. If the EU were to ban Bitcoin it would probably suffer a big plunge just like if the US did it. It wouldn't destroy Bitcoin because in time farms would move and difficulty would adjust but short term it would be a disaster.

[suzanne5223]

China is not only country in the world where Bitcoin is mine although they have highest number of miners in the world but with the country like Syria etc legalizing Bitcoin mining if the Chinese government ban Bitcoin mining today it will boost the price of Bitcoin market.

[Kyraishi]

I think that if they ban it or not it will still go on and nothing much will change, maybe some of the big companies that are set to mining bitcoin will relocate or maybe shut down, but a lot of individuals will stay and just mine in the shadows as all things that become illegal, and the thing about bitcoin is that it is adaptive, the blockchain and the difficulty is based on how many people are mining so if china banned bitcoin mining, the number of miners will go down but the price and the supply of the bitcoin will stay the same.

I wouldn't be viable and likely possible for people to just stay in the shadows and ignore the regulations that would be made public if China ever does choose to ban bitcoin mining. Those companies attempting to hide would likely be caught since it's pretty easy to locate an area where a lot of electricity is being used (implying that it's a bitcoin mining operation).

Instead, I reckon we'd see a lot of short term panic from the instant drop of miners (a lot of chinese companies would likely instantly need to shut down and find a place to relocate with decent electricity prices), and we'd lose a lot of support.

Price dumps, longer transaction times, are all very real consequences that could happen if this goes through.

[Shasha80]

If China bans bitcoin mining there will be no destruction in the world of cryptocurrency, because mining companies in China will move
location to other countries that can receive. Indeed, there are many mining farms in China, but they will not have a negative effect to
bitcoin.A mining company must have a solution and there is always a plan B related to this. So large companies like Bitman too has
mining farm in various countries to anticipate if this happens.

[boltz]

If China bans Bitcoin mining then we would wait days for a transaction to be confirmed , mining power will abolish at a high percentage, Bitcoin will go down a lot and a lot of other secondary effects who will make Bitcoin slow in all sectors.
Besides this, if something like this would happen ( which I think its no possible ) a lot of miners will move from China to other Asians countries very fast in order to keep their business running and a lot of new mining factories will appear in countries like Iceland or Ukraine and Russia.

[Artemis3]

Not much really! Only the price will tank to test the previous bear market low or maybe even go deeper

A ban is always a big hit. If the EU were to ban Bitcoin it would probably suffer a big plunge just like if the US did it. It wouldn't destroy Bitcoin because in time farms would move and difficulty would adjust but short term it would be a disaster.

I wasn't talking about bitcoin price, i was talking about Bitcoin network. The price could fluctuate, as always, but it also does recover, as always. While mining is not banned, exchanges and the use of bitcoin is, and as i recall, at that time the price also did fluctuate, but its long in the past... Bitcoin will continue without China, or any other country for that matter. And in reality, ban just make things harder, but doesn't disappear it completely. Unlike mining, you can still use bitcoin if you are careful. To hide mining is very hard unless you are also very small, perhaps a few asic miners but never those large facilities.

Also miners can always double as "self subsided" heaters.

[Ashong Salonga]

If ever that China will ban Bitcoin Mining, it will affect people who are working on it. Bitcoin mining becomes one of their source of income, it would be hard for them to recover in case that it will be gone.

[Suharti12]

If China prohibits mining Bitcoin it will only have an impact in their own country, the Bitcoin miners will certainly be very disappointed and stop doing this work.  But not for other countries, Bitcoin mining is one way to get money from Bitcoin, if China stops mining Bitcoin this will actually benefit Bitcoin miners from other countries, because their rivals are reduced.

[gandame]

If ever that China will ban Bitcoin Mining, it will affect people who are working on it. Bitcoin mining becomes one of their source of income, it would be hard for them to recover in case that it will be gone.

Yes will have big affected to china if they ban it because many are working in mining bitcoin.
So its been hard to some people on china once this is happen.

[Zeke_23]

If ever that China will ban Bitcoin Mining, it will affect people who are working on it. Bitcoin mining becomes one of their source of income, it would be hard for them to recover in case that it will be gone.

Yes will have big affected to china if they ban it because many are working in mining bitcoin.
So its been hard to some people on china once this is happen.

Not only in the citizen of China, but also in the whole cryptocurrency. Every user not only the miners will face another dump. We all know that when Bitcoin was banned in a certain country, its demand will decrease, it will affect the price of bitcoin and that will become a struggle again.

[Kambal2000]

If ever that China will ban Bitcoin Mining, it will affect people who are working on it. Bitcoin mining becomes one of their source of income, it would be hard for them to recover in case that it will be gone.

Yes will have big affected to china if they ban it because many are working in mining bitcoin.
So its been hard to some people on china once this is happen.

Not only in the citizen of China, but also in the whole cryptocurrency. Every user not only the miners will face another dump. We all know that when Bitcoin was banned in a certain country, its demand will decrease, it will affect the price of bitcoin and that will become a struggle again.

It will not be an end game for Bitcoin if China banned mining, we all know that for few years they are not in favor, but still the number of users still increasing everyday despite of it, so we really don't care about China at all as Bitcoin can stand to itself and there's a lot of miners out there that can fulfill the responsibility.

[adeandro]

I hope this does not happen, because it can negatively affect the market

[NeironixNV]

This is a very mixed decision to ban mining in China, since China is one of the leading countries in the development of this direction in the crypto industry.

[audaciousbeing]

If anybody is trying to under quote the effect of such ban, it would be grossly misleading because truth be told, when mining becomes outlawed in China, the effect in the market would be drastic and I see a lot of people abandoning crypto because it would mean transactions would not get confirmed and the moment that is happening, that is the beginning of the end unless something drastic is done to reverse the trend. But the good news is that quite a number of mining farms are run by entrepreneurs and they are aware of the volatility of their status in that part of the world which is making them consider other locations to set up farms and when China pulls the plug, the effect would not be really drastic.

[DaveWave]

This is a very mixed decision to ban mining in China, since China is one of the leading countries in the development of this direction in the crypto industry.

China is not totally against the crypto industry. China just wanted to regulate or let's say take control as deep as possible. It will be impossible for the Chinese government as they are decentralized. I won't be surprised if China will create their own crypto version in the future as there are many big cities that are turning into digital payments.

[kooboat]

Should mining be banned in China, it would be a very big blow to the cryptocurrencies considering the the number of mining plants the citizens own in that particular country. In spite of the many challenges that comes with mining of cryptocurrencies, China is still a strong country so far as the mining of cryptocurrencies are concerned.