The fact that China had announced and decided to get rid of all the Cryptocurrency miners from their country is causing a huge exodus to take place. This might be bigger than the Jew’s exodus of history. Many of the people who depended on the industry are being forced either to change their work field or they have to move out of China.
There are many people who are opting for the second option. The situation isn’t ideal in any of the cases and both options are quite troublesome indeed. However, a decision had been made and the workings are going in accordance with it. Many miners have already started their move out of China.
This move by China had caused some problems and uncertainty in the cryptocurrency market too. The value of Bitcoin fell down by a huge mark just a day before. “China may make up less than 50% of Bitcoin mining by year-end, down from 65%,” said Dan Weiskopf, co-portfolio manager of the Amplify Transformational Data Sharing ETF, in an email interview.
“The decline in the hash is probably a short-term phenomenon and evidence of China miners coming offline,” Weiskopf said. “It is a net positive for North America miners who are now expanding and scheduled to have a lot of hash come online later in 2021 and into 2022.”
With this huge phenomenon taking place in the middle of a pandemic it can be something that affects the cryptocurrency economy and industry up to a huge extent. Now the only thing that we can do is wait and watch for what is to come in the future.
Last year, the world of Bitcoin was thrown into chaos by China’s crackdown on cryptocurrencies, prompting a major exodus of “miners,” who use energy-intensive computers to “mine” (or produce) new Bitcoins, to other parts of the world.
New evidence suggests that the migration exacerbated the environmental impact of cryptomining, which already consumes more power than several nations. The study, published in the journal Joule, was peer-reviewed and found that between 2020 and 2021, the share of the Bitcoin network that used renewable energy like wind, solar, or hydropower decreased from 42% on average to 25%.
One possible explanation is that during the wet summer months in China, Bitcoin miners no longer had access to hydropower, which previously supplied their computers with cheap, abundant, renewable electricity. Many of the miners left for neighbouring Kazakhstan or even further away for the United States.
Miners in those nations have been increasing their use of fossil fuels, particularly coal in Kazakhstan and natural gas in the United States. Coal and natural gas both contribute to global warming because their combustion releases copious volumes of carbon dioxide into the air.
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. Co-author Alex de Vries remarked, “It’s bad news for Bitcoin owners since their holdings just become more dirty.”
Mr. de Vries added, “There was a lot of hope that China’s prohibition on Bitcoin mining would make mining more green.” However, the reality is that “it was already a dirty company and it just grew worse.”
At a time when Bitcoin’s position in mainstream finance has grown, the newest study adds to the discussion concerning Bitcoin mining’s environmental implications.
In particular, Bitcoin mining has drawn attention due to the high energy cost associated with producing one Bitcoin due to its architecture, which makes the process increasingly difficult as more miners join in. (Another cryptocurrency, Ethereum, is developing an energy-efficient alternative.)
