Well, Bitcoin is the new way of making money nowadays. China had been the hub of Bitcoin Miners for a long period of time. Most of the Bitcoin miners could be found in China itself and the concentration was mainly docked around the Beijing area. However, there is a sudden shift in the environment and now Beijing wants to get rid of all these Bitcoin miners as soon as possible.
The severe crackdown of Bitcoin mining and trading had been dubbed as the great mining migration. People do come up with some ridiculous names and there is no doubt in that but this once actually makes sense.
The expulsion of the Bitcoin miners from Beijing, China is a big move in the Bitcoin industry and this could become a game-changer for Texas. The exodus as some might live to call it is underway now. The world of Bitcoin is changing under our very noses.
“You are going to see a dramatic shift over the next few months,” said Brandon Arvanaghi who is known as previously a security engineer at crypto exchange Gemini. “We have governors like Greg Abbott in Texas who are promoting mining. It is going to become a real industry in the United States, which is going to be incredible.”
The fact that China has given the Bitcoin miners around 2 months to clear out speaks a lot in terms of the sense that they are actually blaming the crypto mines on their energy misses. Beijing’s climate targets were not met and this leads to the spearheaded doom of the Bitcoin miners in the area. The shift in the trend of the world might be a huge impact on the world of Bitcoin.
Last year, the world of Bitcoin was thrown into chaos by China’s crackdown on cryptocurrencies, which caused a major migration of “miners,” who use energy-intensive computers to “mine” (or produce) new Bitcoins, to relocate to other parts of the world.
New evidence suggests that the migration exacerbated the environmental damage caused by cryptomining, which already consumes more electricity than many countries. A research published in the journal Joule found that by August 2021, the share of the Bitcoin network’s energy consumption that came from renewable resources like wind, solar, or hydropower had plummeted from an average of 42% in 2020 to 25%.
It’s possible that this is because Bitcoin miners in China no longer have access to the hydropower that had supplied their computers with cheap, abundant, green electricity throughout the wet summer months. Rather, many of the miners left for neighbouring Kazakhstan and even further away to the United States.
Coal in Kazakhstan, and natural gas in the United States, are two examples of the fossil fuels that miners have been using more of recently. Burning fossil fuels like coal and natural gas releases large quantities of greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, contributing to global warming.
Bitcoin mining may be responsible for around 65 megatons of carbon dioxide per year, according to estimates by academics at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Technical University of Munich, ETH Zurich, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Bitcoin holders “just got more dirty,” as one of the paper’s authors, Alex de Vries, put it.
Mr. de Vries added, “There was a lot of hope that China’s prohibition on Bitcoin mining would make mining more green.” “But the truth is, it was a shady trade to begin with and things have only gotten worse from there.”
At a time when Bitcoin’s standing in mainstream finance has grown, this new study adds to the discussion regarding the environmental impacts of Bitcoin mining. Bitcoin mining in particular has been under investigation since the network is built to make new blocks increasingly harder as more miners join in, increasing the amount of energy required to mine a single Bitcoin. (Another cryptocurrency, Ethereum, is developing an energy-efficient alternative.)
