Miners behind the Great Firewall may never have downed tools, say Cambridge crypto-boffins
China has become the world’s second most prolific miner of bitcoin – or maybe it always was – according to new data from the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance (CCAF). The Centre on Tuesday announced its latest hashrate data analysing activity from September 2021 to January 2022 and found the USA is home to 37.84 percent of mining capacity, ahead of China at 21.11 percent, Kazakhstan ‘s 13.22 percent and Canada’s 6.48 percent. China banned mining and trading cryptocurrency in May 2021 – and re-iterated that ban in fact it did so several times in 2021 alone, and on other occasions in preceding years. The CCAF says the ban appears to have been effective as hashrates – the metric of how quickly systems can complete the proof of work required to produce a Bitcoin – dropped to zero before returning to 30.
