Here are the Countries Benefiting From China's Crackdown On Bitcoin Mining

China And Bitcoin Mining 

Seeing an exodus of bitcoin miners towards foreign shores is the crackdown by the Chinese government as bitcoin mining consumes large amounts of electricity, the rising prices for the cryptocurrency have thereby ensured that it remains a hugely profitable enterprise.

With a positive effect on the country’s economy, Bitcoin mining plays an important role in reviving economies and thereafter providing employment in towns and cities still not connected to the economic nerve centers, as an example, it helped absorb surplus hydropower production in China’s Sichuan province and providing employment to workers in Inner Mongolia. 

The following are the three countries standing to benefit from China’s decision to clamp down on bitcoin mining. 

Canada 

Here we find that fulfilling most requirements for bitcoin mining Canada comes with additionally cheap electricity, with naturally cold weather that is essential to cool down overheated computer systems that mine bitcoin. 

It is here that Canada’s Quebec province according to reports is attracting miners producing a surplus of 100 terawatt-hours of hydropower over 10 years where this one terawatt is equal to the sustained power of 114 megawatts per year. Asking for information from HydroQuebec the local power company is 35 cryptocurrency mining organizations. 

Hence it is here that the world’s largest bitcoin mining company Bitmain is now already in talks with Canadian authorities as to the director of business development at HydroQuebec, David Vincent claims that he Canadian province that has around three or four attributed to the world’s largest of the blockchain players. 

Switzerland 

Switzerland in recent times has set itself up as the destination for cryptocurrency initial coin offerings as it is trying to attract bitcoin miners as well and Bitmain has set up a Swiss subsidiary in Zug, the small town which is also known as Crypto Valley in the country.clais. 

Big on hydropower, Switzerland has overall average electricity prices on the higher side as it is said the industrial users are offered discounted rates in addition to the country’s moves boosting its reputation as an international destination for cryptocurrencies that will also be boosted by the presence of bitcoin miners. 

United States 

Turning out to be the United States’ gain is the loss of China as Bitmain has therefore set up offices there with Washington, a state with plenty of hydropower and cool temperatures witnessing a boom in bitcoin mining. 

Thereby the CNBC reports that a small town in the Washington state is being noticed as the home to a dozen of the biggest bitcoin miners in the country and has received requests from 75 more. Thereafter it is noted that the proximity of the bitcoin mines could also help to reduce network latency as at big cryptocurrency exchanges because the more bitcoin nodes are connected to a block, the faster the transactions are being processed as also less likely that an orphan block will be received. 

A Short Report On Who Is Jihan Wu, And Does He Control Bitcoin Today?

The co-founder of Bitmain, Jihan Wu is one of the most recognised as also valuable bitcoin companies that have come into the limelight to be the supporter of Bitcoin Unlimited as a solution to solve Bitcoin’s scalability issue and he maintains AntPool holding the largest hash rate distribution amongst mining pools that are currently AntPool mines 16.4% of all blocks making Jihan Wu highly influential in the Bitcoin community. 

Bitmain

Established in 2013, Bitmain developed and sold the world’s leading bitcoin miners using Bitmain’s ASIC chip technology as its initial bitcoin miner was Antminer S1 upgrading over time to match up to bitcoin’s difficulty level. Thereby Antminer S9 in 2016 was the world’s first consumer-grade bitcoin with the most power-efficient miner based on a 16nm process ASIC chip released by Bitmain. As the proud owner of several brands including Antminer, Antpool, and Hashnest, the company had ranked number one in their respective fields as with Bitmain being headquartered in Beijing along with offices in Amsterdam, Hong Kong, Tel Aviv, Qingdao, Chengdu, and Shenzhen. 

Bitcoin Unlimited

With a limited storage capacity of 1MB, the bitcoin blocks since the beginning and under the current popular system of Bitcoin Core argues that the size of these blocks should be increased as it would enable smoother running by decongesting the blocks. Bitcoin unlimited unlike the present rigid size of 1 MB advocates complete freedom and flexibility to increase the size of blockchain and this is done by miners. In case of a consensus on this, they will have a new bitcoin blockchain with large-sized blocks. 

With a feeling that the increasing size of blocks can result in a hard fork in the code which would split the network are the opponents of Bitcoin Unlimited. Here they believe that such flexibility results in miners opting for bigger and bigger blocks as of now making it harder for miners with limited resources to mine, and thereby it is found to concentrate the mining power in the hands of few of the miners. Hence the concentration results in essentially centralization that is opposite to the idea of decentralisation which is core to bitcoin. 

The Final Words 

It is here that Jihan Wu has been aggressively pushing a hard fork with the adoption of Bitcoin Unlimited but hasn’t gathered enough support yet. Here comes the alternate solution to the problem that is called SegWit or Segregated Witness that doesn’t require a hard fork equally debated and no consensus has emerged. The bitcoin Unlimited has the mining pool support by the proposal which is about 40% followed by SegWit at 34% while the rest support BIP100 and 8MB Blocks.