Nearly all top bitcoin mining pools have shed a significant amount of hash power over the past week as a stream of news of bans and regulatory changes across different jurisdictions in China has miners on edge. Over the past week, top pools AntPool and F2Pool, for example, have both lost over 30% of their hashrate.
- China’s Qinghai province ordered miners to shut down.
- China’s Xinjian province ordered the same.
- China’s Yunnan region ordered strict licensing and registration, but not a complete ban.
Hashrate from ViaBTC and SlushPool remained almost unchanged amid the chaos, however. Neither pool showed noticeable drops in hash power.
An extreme example of a pool that did lose a lot of hashrate is China-based 1THash, one of the top 15 largest mining pools. In the past week, 1THash lost roughly 70% of its hashrate.
China’s planned “crackdown” on bitcoin mining announced in late May spooked the entire market but exactly what China planned to do was unclear. With several provinces enacting new restrictions or all-out bans on mining, the future for mining in China is becoming more clear. And miners are continuing to leave China in response.
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Finding hosting space to power all the machines leaving China will be difficult. But other regions are eager to welcome bitcoin miners within their borders. The steady stream of hashrate entering North America is escalating. And new regions like El Salvador have big plans for mining farms of their own.
For now, there’s no reason to believe the drop in hashrate will be a long-lasting state. Zooming out, the size and rate of the latest decrease is consistent with other previous drops. After machines shuffle around the map and hashpower relocates to new regions, the steady growth of Bitcoin’s hashrate should resume.
