China restricts access to mining-pool domains and cryptocurrency media

One of China’s cryptocurrency news portals, Chainnews, reported a shutdown after local users lost access to the site’s website and app, as well as to its competitors ODaily and BlockBeats. At the same time, providers began blocking access to mining-pool domains, The Block.

Some outlets had to switch to Telegram and launch on new domains. ODaily and Block Beats continue to operate, but their mobile apps are inactive, limiting reach.

The publication obtained internal documents from China Telecom. According to the document, the organisation developed an algorithm to detect and block connections from miner-owned internal IP addresses to the main mining pools.

The provider can either disable internet service for particular IP addresses, or manually blacklist the URLs that pools use to connect to individual hardware.

Journalists described these steps as further signs of repression against local crypto-industry players. Under government pressure, firms curtailed operations or moved their business to other countries.

In The Block, it was confirmed that the domains of almost all of the ten largest hash-rate pools for mining Bitcoin and Ethereum are inaccessible to internet users in China.

According to btc.com, at the time of writing there had been a noticeable drop in computing power for the two main cryptocurrencies, down as much as 18%, observed by F2Pool, ViaBTC and BinancePool. Their representatives spoke of connectivity difficulties in Telegram, according to CoinDesk.

Earlier in October, media reported that in China are studying the possibilities of prosecuting mining.

Earlier in October, China blocked the cryptocurrency analytics services CoinGecko and CoinMarketCap.

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