China failed to ban bitcoin mining
China banned bitcoin mining in June 2021, but new data suggests that the country still hosts a large bitcoin mining industry. Does this prove that banning bitcoin mining is impossible?
May 23rd 2022
Source: Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance
Cambridge has updated their Bitcoin mining map, showing that Chinese miners produce 21% of Bitcoin's hashrate even though the activity has been banned there since June 2021. This hashrate share corresponds to a significant decline from the 46% in April 2021, before the ban.
However, it still shows that a substantial amount of the Bitcoin hashrate is illegally produced in China, proving that banning bitcoin mining is no easy task even for one of the world's most authoritarian governments.