Bitcoin mining set to wane in China as green concerns and financial risks see Beijing ramp up the pressure
- Beijing is ramping up the pressure on bitcoin miners amid growing green ambitions and rising concerns over the financial risks posed by cryptocurrencies
- Cryptocurrency mining operations have already been targeted by a number of Chinese municipal and provincial governments, and pressure set to intensify
China’s place at the centre of global bitcoin mining is fading as Beijing ramps up the pressure on heavy energy-use practices amid growing green ambitions and rising concerns over the financial risks posed by cryptocurrencies, according to experts.
“We are seeing the cryptocurrency market enter a path to ‘de-China-isation’ – first on trading and now on computing power, based on a series of stronger steps taken against cryptocurrencies and bitcoin mining last week by Beijing,” said Wang Juan, associate professor on blockchain at Xi’an Jiaotong University and a member of the OECD Blockchain Expert Policy Advisory Board.
Although the creation and trading of cryptocurrencies like bitcoin has been illegal in China since 2017, pushing exchanges like Binance, Huobi, and OkEx offshore, the government has, up until recently, turned a blind eye to the country’s bitcoin miners – companies and individuals that operate the computers that make up bitcoin’s decentralised network.
02:27
Cryptocurrency volatility highlighted by China’s recent crackdown and Elon Musk comments
China currently accounts for about 65 per cent of the bitcoin hash rate, a measure of the processing power used by the bitcoin network to verify transactions and mine new tokens of the cryptocurrency, according to estimates by Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index (CBECI).
