China is again with a vengeance. The Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance, or CCAF, collected information “spanning the period from September 2021 to January 2022” for their latest study. The headline is that, ban or no ban, the Asian nation controls 21% of the Global Bitcoin mining hashrate. Since June 2021, right here in NewsBTC, we’ve been wracking our brains making an attempt to determine why did China ban bitcoin mining. Maybe we had been barking on the flawed tree the entire time.
According to the CCAF’s numbers, unsurprisingly the “US has remained at the forefront of Bitcoin mining and extended its leading position (37.84%).” For their half, “China has re-emerged as a major mining hub (21.11%). Kazakhstan (13.22%), Canada (6.48%), and Russia (4.66%) have been relegated to more distant places.” Let’s see what else can we be taught from the CCAF’s numbers.
Is China All The Way Back? How Did This Happen?
As it seems, the CCAF evaluation uncovered numbers that “strongly suggest that significant underground mining activity has formed in the country”. Can we ensure that the reason is actual? And whether it is, how did the underground China bitcoin mining trade surge so quick?
“Following the government ban in June 2021, reported hashrate for the entire country effectively plummeted to zero during the months of July and August. Yet reported hashrate suddenly surged back to 30.47 EH/s in September 2021, instantly catapulting China to second place globally in terms of installed mining capacity (22.29% of total market).”
The report wonders what occurred, “a comeback of this magnitude within the period of one month would seem unlikely given physical constraints, as it takes time to find existing or build new non-traceable hosting facilities at that scale”. And theorizes that perhaps the underground miners had been utilizing VPNs to cover their location after which, abruptly, determined that they had been secure sufficient to cease hiding. Which appears unlikely.
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Non-China Countries
Sadly however predictably, the research additionally came upon that “the hashrate recovery has not been distributed evenly”. How did the non-China international locations within the Top 5 do?
- The United States “surpassed the rest of the world in terms of hashrate growth. This is evidenced by installed capacity surging from 42.74 EH/s (35.40%) in August 2021 to 70.97 EH/s (37.84%) in January 2022.”
- In Kazakhstan, for his or her half, “Total hashrate continued to increase in September and peaked at 27.31 EH/s in October, until repeated power outages towards the end of last year, and a week-long internet shutdown earlier this year, forced miners to temporarily suspend operations.”
- Surprisingly, “Russia on the other hand not only experienced a substantial drop in relative hashrate share from 11.23% in August 2021 to 4.66% in January 2022, but also a significant decline in total installed mining capacity contribution from 13.56 EH/s to 8.74 EH/s over the same period.”
- Last however not least, “Canada experienced only a moderate increase in its hashrate from 11.54 EH/s in August 2021 to 12.15 EH/s in January 2022, which resulted in a loss in market share from 9.55% to 6.48% as total network hashrate was growing significantly faster. ”
The CCAF Spreads FUD
Of course, the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance couldn’t go the chance to unfold some unfounded rumors about bitcoin mining. This is what the CCAF stated:
“These geographic shifts in mining activities bring to the fore how relocations impact the overall sustainability of the network. For instance, recent research has suggested that the Chinese decision to ban Bitcoin mining has indeed worsened – rather than improved – Bitcoin’s environmental footprint.”
The CCAF is utilizing this study’s findings, which principally says that they NOW imagine what bitcoiners at all times stated. That China was principally utilizing hydropower power for bitcoin mining, and never coal. The reality is, so far as utilizing inexperienced power goes, bitcoin mining continues to be the cleanest industry in the world.
Whenever we discover intentional FUD spreading like this one proper right here, we now have to take a look at who paid for the research. As it seems, the numbers come immediately from the Cambridge Digital Assets Programme. The CCAF host the CDAP “in collaboration with 16 prominent public and private institutions”. Among them, we discover the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Mastercard, Visa, and the World Bank.
And proper then, the whole lot made sense.
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