Miner Weekly: Is China Dominating Bitcoin Mining… Again?
Recent news reports don't provide an accurate picture
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This article first appeared in Miner Weekly, BlocksBridge Consulting’s weekly newsletter curating the latest news in bitcoin mining and data analysis from TheMinerMag. Subscribe to receive in your inbox once a week.
Over the past week, there has been a slew of media coverage about China’s alleged bitcoin mining dominance all of a sudden despite the country’s mining ban, all derived from a social media post that was somewhat misleading, if not entirely inaccurate.
It all boils down to a persistent misunderstanding about the roles of bitcoin mining pools and mine operators. You can check out the headlines first.
The source of all the mentions about China regaining hashrate dominance comes from a post on X by Ki Young Ju, founder and CEO of CryptoQuant. The post cited data showing that Chinese bitcoin mining pools operate 55% of the network, while U.S. pools manage 40%. While the data is approximately correct, its binary interpretation has likely led to misinformation.
Ju added in his post that, “U.S. pools primarily cater to institutional miners in America, while Chinese pools support smaller miners in Asia,” leading to the conclusion that “bitcoin hashrate dominance is shifting to U.S. mining companies.”
However, this interpretation misses some nuances. A bitcoin mining pool—a virtual cloud service—aggregates the compute power (aka hashrate) of individual bitcoin mines at various locations, not just within the country where the mining pool’s team is mainly located.
For sure, Foundry USA Pool specifically caters to institutional operations based in the U.S., so you can expect the hashrate connected to Foundry USA Pool to all come from within the U.S. Same with MARA Pool, the solo mining pool of U.S. mining giant Marathon Digital. But you can still operate a bitcoin mine in the U.S. and connect its hashrate to Antpool or f2pool.
The point is, major Chinese pools like Antpool, F2pool, ViaBTC, BTC.com, and Binance Pool aggregate hashrate from mines across the globe, including those in the U.S. It’s crucial to note that we lack insight into the exact geographic breakdown of their hashrate, making assumptions about how much of their power originates from China unreliable.
Take BitFuFu, Bitmain’s mining proxy, which alone operates nearly 30 EH/s of hashrate. It most likely connects to Antpool given Bitmain’s ownership of Antpool, so that is nearly 20% of Antpool’s hashrate already. Per BitFuFu’s annual reports, the hashrate under its management is spread across the world with a major presence in the U.S. so its hashrate is neither “relatively small” nor based in Asia.
It is undeniable that the hashrate in the U.S. has been growing significantly since China’s mining ban so much so that it is not even news that the U.S. holds the crown now.
According to data from TheMinerMag, Foundry USA Pool and MARA Pool mined 18% of all bitcoin blocks in January 2022. As of August 2024, that figure has risen to 33.6%, and that doesn’t include U.S.-based hashrate connected to Chinese pools.
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