A number of cryptocurrency miners in China began to move and sell their mining machines abroad, such as the United States, Canada, Australia, Russia, Kazakhstan, to Indonesia. This is the impact of China's ban and crackdown on cryptocurrencies, such as bitcoin and others.
"Many miners are going out of business (crypto money) to comply with (Chinese) government policies. Mining machines (crypto money) are being sold like scrap metal," said Mike Huang, a cryptocurrency mining operator in Sichuan, China, as quoted by Reuters on Friday. (25/6).
Huang Dezhi, another cryptocurrency mining operator in Sichuan, admitted that he had also explored abroad such as Kazakhstan. Sichuan itself is one of the areas known as the second bitcoin mining center in China after Xinjiang.
"If the government doesn't reverse the policy, we will have no other choice. You can't go against the central government's decision," Dezhi said.
Not only Huang and Dezhi, Liu Hongfei, another cryptocurrency mining operator, also admitted that he had to leave this business because of China's ban.
"If the government doesn't allow it, I have to stop. You can't possibly be against the Communist Party in China, can you?" Hongfei said.
One of China's largest cryptocurrency machine makers, Bitmain, said it had suspended the sale of products there. Next, they started looking for a new 'asylum' abroad with new clients.
This condition also caused the price of cryptocurrency mining machines to drop dramatically from around 4,000 yuan to 700 yuan to 800 yuan. Not only Bitmain, another company, BIT Mining stated that it has sold around 320 cryptocurrency mining machines to Kazakhstan.
The plan is that the company will sell another 2,600 machines to Central Asia starting July 1, 2021. In fact, the company has also poured investment into a cryptocurrency mining center in Texas, USA.
"We are accelerating our overseas development for high-quality alternative mining resources," said Xianfeng Yan, CEO of BIT Mining.
Research from OKEx Insights estimates that around 90 percent of cryptocurrency mining activities stop immediately in China as a result of this ban. But on the other hand, this condition benefits cryptocurrency mining activities outside China.
"Every mining operation outside of China immediately benefits because their mining rewards automatically go up," said BlocksBridge Consulting Founder Nishant Sharma.
The movement of cryptocurrency miners in China is a follow-up impact of the Chinese government's ban on bitcoin and others in their country. Previously, this ban had an impact on decreasing the price of various cryptocurrencies, for example the price of bitcoin which fell from the range of US$60 thousand to US$30 thousand per coin.
China took this policy to avoid cryptocurrencies' speculative risks to their financial markets. At the same time, China's central bank is testing its own digital currency.
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