{"id":403093,"date":"2021-06-24T08:11:58","date_gmt":"2021-06-24T06:11:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/?p=403093"},"modified":"2021-06-24T08:20:24","modified_gmt":"2021-06-24T06:20:24","slug":"bitcoin-miners","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/cryptocurrency\/403093-bitcoin-miners.html","title":{"rendered":"Bitcoin miners flee China"},"content":{"rendered":"

The heads of some of the world\u2019s biggest cryptocurrency exchanges say Bitcoin miners are shifting operations out of China as authorities intensify their crackdown on the space.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re seeing a lot of those miners moving out of China to other places,\u201d Changpeng \u201cCZ\u201d Zhao, the CEO of Binance Holdings Ltd., the world\u2019s biggest crypto exchange by reported turnover, said in an interview at the Qatar Economic Forum on Tuesday. \u201cSome of them are sending their mining equipment to overseas. There\u2019s big shipments.\u201d<\/p>\n

Zhao said he\u2019s seen movement by clients in Binance\u2019s mining pool, which combines the computing power of number-crunching machines that verify cryptocurrency transactions.<\/p>\n

China\u2019s moves have injected uncertainty into the cryptocurrency market and helped pull Bitcoin down to the lower end of its recent trading range, with the coin briefly falling below $30,000 on Tuesday after having reached nearly $65,000 in mid-April. The hashrate, which measures the processing power used in Bitcoin mining and is used as a proxy for mining activity, has also dropped by about 40% in the past couple of weeks, according to data from BTC.com.<\/p>\n

While a lower hashrate is often portrayed as a negative for Bitcoin, a temporary disruption of mining power as rigs are moved out of China could also be embraced by some Bitcoin bulls who argue that a concentration of mining capacity has long been a vulnerability for an asset prized by proponents for its independence from governments and central banks.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cIn the future you\u2019ll have a different geographical distribution of hashpower,\u201d Sam Bankman-Fried, the former Jane Street trader who now runs the crypto derivatives exchange FTX, said in an interview on Thursday. \u201cIt\u2019s expensive to move rigs but it\u2019s not impossible.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Global Times reported that multiple Bitcoin miners in China\u2019s Sichuan province were closed on Sunday as authorities intensified their crackdown. On Tuesday, Bloomberg reported that China had summoned officials from its biggest banks to reiterate rules banning cryptocurrency services that were first issued in 2013.<\/p>\n

China\u2019s measures mean the country\u2019s share of Bitcoin mining could fall from an estimated 65% to less than 50% by the end of the year, according to Dan Weiskopf, co-portfolio manager of the Amplify Transformational Data Sharing ETF, an actively-managed exchange-traded fund that\u2019s composed of blockchain-related stocks, with about 20% of its portfolio in crypto miners.<\/p>\n

Alternate destinations for Chinese mining operations include Russia, Kazakhstan and Texas, according to market participants. Weiskopf cited Canada, Sweden and Argentina as other possibilities.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe decline in hash is probably a short-term phenomenon and evidence of China miners coming offline,\u201d he said in an e-mail. \u201cIt is a net positive for North America miners who are now expanding and scheduled to have a lot of hash come online later in 2021 and into 2022.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now read: South African brothers vanish \u2013 along with R51 billion in Bitcoin<\/a><\/h3>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The heads of some of the world\u2019s biggest cryptocurrency exchanges say Bitcoin miners are shifting operations out of China.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":341034,"featured_media":403095,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[44696],"tags":[187],"class_list":["post-403093","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cryptocurrency","tag-bitcoin"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/403093"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/341034"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=403093"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/403093\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/403095"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=403093"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=403093"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=403093"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}