While the United States has extended its lead as the world's largest bitcoin mining business, China is back in second place, despite a government ban last year.
The US has 37.84 per cent of the world's hashrates, according to data compiled by the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance between September 2021 and January this year. The hash rate, the total computing power used to mine and process work proving transactions on the blockchain and a measure of how secure the Bitcoin network is, is back at its peak after falling last year.
After last year's ban, Chinese mining, which operates by stealth, has re-emerged as a major hub this year, accounting for 21.11 percent of the global hash rate. The figures confirm what industry insiders have long believed: there is a lot of underground mining going on in China. In May, Beijing tightened its grip on the cryptocurrency market. While mining in China may be done using VPNS, the computers appear to be operating in another country. Because so much of the mining is done through VPN and the like, the Cambridge data are subject to a wide margin of error.
Kazakhstan has 13.22%, Canada 6.48%, and Russia 4.66%, with a tendency to migrate to other regions.