Russia receives applications to host 1.8 million miners after China bans bitcoin mining

Over the past few months, 14 of the largest mining companies have shipped more than 2 million units of equipment out of China. The main recipients were Russia, Kazakhstan, the United States and Canada, пишет Financial Times.

One of the largest US miners, Bit Digital, has hired an international logistics firm to move assets out of China and expects delivery of nearly 1,000 devices at the Port of New York.

The company says that began migrating in March 2020 and, at the time the ban was announced, it had 20,000 miners left to move. 372 Bit Digital devices had to be written off because their useful life had expired.

In the same period, eight of the ten largest North American mining firms expanded their computing capacity. Canadian Hut 8 in June bought 24,000 miners from MicroBT. Bitmain in August sold 30,000 devices to Las Vegas-based Marathon Digital Holdings. Meanwhile, the price of Bitmain’s Antminer S19 from May to July fell by 41.7%.

Mining has been developing rapidly in Kazakhstan. The local Bitfufu received 80,000 devices, and BIT Mining – 7,849.

The Russian mining hosting BitCluster has placed more than 5,000 devices in the past two months.

\”Since the de facto ban on cryptocurrency mining in China, we have seen a sharply rising demand for our services from the largest Chinese mining companies,\” said ForkLog co-founder Vitaliy Borchenko.

According to him, the total volume of contracts signed for 2022 exceeds 200 MW. The aggregate capacity of clients in negotiations exceeds 1 GW.

\”The infrastructure is currently being deployed to host these clients,\” BitCluster added.

A representative of BitRiver, the operator of mining data-centres, told ForkLog that in recent months they had received applications to host 1.8 million miners from China.

The exact number of devices actually deployed by the company was not disclosed, but the following rough calculations were provided:

\”We have grown from 150 MW to 600 MW. Even if all this equipment operated at 3.25 kW, that would amount to more than 100,000 units.\”

Some of the equipment from China is still in transit or awaiting shipment.

Meanwhile, BitRiver rejected an offer from a client who wanted to bring in a million devices – the parties could not agree on the terms of operation.

Arcane Crypto analysts estimate that 700,000 obsolete Chinese miners did not return to the network after the ban.

Some of these devices are landing on markets in Venezuela and Paraguay, known for cheap electricity. Caracas-based Doctor Miner has placed around 7,000 machines from three major Chinese miners. They are also involved in assembling ASIC miners from parts of equipment that has already been decommissioned.

The Asunción-based company Digital Assets is preparing to place 15,500 miners in the coming months but faces competition from locals who have begun buying machines and mining themselves.

Recall that after the de facto ban on cryptocurrency mining in China, miners shut off equipment with a total hash rate of 90 EH/s, and energy consumption reached 5.2 GW.

According to Bitfury, some devices with a total hash rate of around 22 EH/s and power of 2.6 GW are significantly outdated and will not return to the network.

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