The share of Chinese miners in Bitcoin’s hashrate was already below 50% in March, before the crackdown on the industry in the country, according to updated data from the Cambridge University team’s project.
According to the Bitcoin mining map tool, which the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance (CCAF) launched in May 2020, China’s share stood at 49.1% in March 2021.
In April the figure fell to 46%, and a year earlier it exceeded 65%.
In May the Chinese authorities intend to take measures against cryptocurrency mining and Bitcoin trading.
Soon the official Xinhua News Agency criticized digital gold and its mining methods. In the following month, authorities in several Chinese provinces ordered miners to cease operations. Among them: Yunnan, Qinghai, Xinjiang, and Inner Mongolia.
In the same month, the State Grid Corporation of China joined the local authorities’ call to cease mining.
Earlier, Poolin vice president Alejandro de la Torre told ForkLog that miners are leaving the PRC and the era of the country’s dominance in the industry can be considered over.
Help migrating to its Chinese clients was offered by Bitmain, the largest manufacturer of mining hardware.
The Cambridge CCAF Bitcoin mining map does not include data for May and June, when overall hashrate declined amid the Chinese authorities’ decisions. On June 28, its daily figure fell below 60 EH/s. The last time such figures were recorded was in July 2019.
CCAF’s methodology is based on information provided by three China-based pools with international client bases — BTC.com, ViaBTC, and Poolin. Since February 2021, Foundry Pool, oriented toward American miners, has been added to them. Their combined hashrate in various periods ranged from 32% to 37%.
CCAF acknowledges that the data sample may not be fully representative, but believes that it provides a reasonably close approximation to the actual distribution of hashrate.
According to CCAF, the accelerated decline in China’s share of Bitcoin mining began in October 2020, and American miners began to increase it, lifting it from 6.7% to 16.8% of total hashrate by April. Kazakhstan’s share in this period rose from 3.6% to 8.2%.
In October 2020, Arcane Research analysts concluded that the dominance of Chinese miners was steadily eroding due to increases in computing power in other countries, including the United States and Kazakhstan.