Taps Coogan – January 10th, 2022

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One of the seldom mentioned idiosyncrasies of the Bitcoin world has been China’s total dominance of the bitcoin mining ‘industry.’ This detail was noteworthy not simply because China’s exceptionally dirty electric grid meant that Bitcoin was basically coal powered, nor because about a quarter of Bitcoin mining capacity got briefly taken offline last year due to coal shortages and deadly mine accidents in slave-labor rife Xinjaing Province, but because if Bitcoin has one security vulnerability, it would be if one entity controlled more than 50% of Bitcoin mining power. While one individual presumably didn’t control all the Bitcoin mining in China, the fact that 75% of mining was conducted in the totalitarian country wasn’t exactly reassuring for the decentralized network.

So perhaps fortuitously for Bitcoin, China essentially banned cryptocurrency mining last year amid a persistent energy shortages and rationing. The result is that the US has gone from a relatively obscure Bitcoin mining player to the world’s largest, with about 35% of capacity, as the following chart from Statista highlights. China now mines 0.0% of Bitcoin.

Of course, charts like this should be taken with a mountain of salt. The country designation for Bitcoin miners is determined by the IP address of the miner, something so easy to spoof a kid could do it – and probably does. The truth is that nobody has any clue where Bitcoin mining is going on and country designation are just a flag of convenience.

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