CCN reports (https://www.ccn.com/flooding-in-sichuan-province-reveals-hidden-world-of-chinas-small-time-bitcoin-miners/) that following the floods in Sichuan Province many miners decided to move out of the mining industry.
Their mining rigs were destroyed and it would cost them a lot of money to buy the new ones. Some of them decided to move to other regions, while others decided to stop mining altogether.
Why?
Because mining has been increasingly turning into a place where corporate and big-size players rule. They use better machines and have deeper pockets to invest into the ventures. ASICs have crushed individuals mining Bitcoin from their home computers.
70% of BTC hash power is said to be located in China, which clearly shows extreme centralization in the industry.
While the very idea behind BTC was to bring forward a decentralized system that is being sustained and sheltered by a wide community without any monopoly or oligopoly in control.
Perhaps, cryptocurrencies of the future will help - in some ways - to bring forward better benefits to individual miners. For instance, by allocating some sort of a "mining stake" to individual IP addresses.
I am from Russia and we have a very tough time with learning how to govern our government. In China, it's much much worse. I would be very unhappy to see the country to export any kind of business or politics ethics to other countries. US has a strong provenance in democracy and human rights. China has a bloody history on both of these fronts.
Maybe, it's actually better to have corporates and whales in control.
So, my question to readers is like that - Would corporates/whales in mining BTC have any interest in destroying BTC?!