Chinese Miners Now Control 66 Percent of the Global Hash Rate

Despite having an infamously unfavorable stance on cryptocurrencies, China continues to lead where mining is concerned. A recent study has revealed how much of the global hash rate is domiciled in China.

According to a December 11 report from news source Reuters, CoinShares, a digital asset management firm based out of London, recently conducted a study that revealed that Bitcoin miners in China control as much as 66 percent of the global mining hash rate. The hash rate is a significant measure of network activity, and an increase in the metric could show a boost in the profitability of Bitcoin mining. 

Renewable Energy and Sophisticated Techn ology 

CoinShares revealed that the Chinese control of the Bitcoin hash rate spiked from 60 percent in June 2019, and currently sits on its highest point since the British firm started to measure the metric back in 2017. The firm estimates that the total crypto mining revenues this year is on track to hit $5.4 billion. The popular Sichuan province accounts for 50 percent of the global hash rate. 

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“Out of the remaining 35 percent of [global] miners, we estimate that 31 percent of global [hash rate] production is evenly split between Washington, New York, British Columbia, Alberta, Quebec, Newfoundland and Labrador, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, the Siberian Federal District of Russia, Kazakhstan, Georgia, and Iran,” the report adds.

The firm alludes to this increase in dominance to the widespread adoption of renewable energy, as it noted that up to 73 percent of the electricity being used to mine Bitcoin across the world is renewable.

However, the firm also alluded to the surge in mining activities in China to the increase in the adoption of sophisticated mining hardware. As CoinShares notes, this early adoption of technology could help the country, as it now has the opportunity to one-up its rivals in that aspect. 

Rivals Getting Ready to Challenge 

The company is surely right, because rivals are starting to come for the king’s crown. The United States alone has been making some moves in the mining space, with Texas serving as the new frontier for this budding sub-industry. 

In 2019 alone, three mining companies have either opened or expanded their operations to the Lonestar State; San Francisco-based Layer1, Whinstone US Inc. and Northern Bitcoin AG (which now owns the largest mining facility in the world), and Bitmain- the largest manufacturer of mining equipment in the world. 

Moving a bit away from Texas, Compute North, a data infrastructure and colocation giant based out of Eden Prairie, Minnesota, said it would open another colocation site in Nebraska. Most mining companies have started to situate their locations in the United States, taking advantage of cheap electricity and an abundance of land- especially in the South Central region. If there’s any country that could challenge China when it comes to dominance in the mining space, it would be the United States.