The United States has scored another victory. It became the world’s top destination for bitcoin miners. The United States overcame China in this race after the latter declared war on cryptocurrencies and mining.
According to new data from Cambridge University, the volume of bitcoin mining in the United States has soared by 428% over a year. As a result, the volume of hashrate – a term used to describe the collective computing power of miners – in the county reached 35.4% of global mining. Several months ago, China dominated the crypto market in terms of hashrate. However, its aggressive stance on the industry, primarily a ban on cryptocurrency transactions, took half the world’s bitcoin miners offline practically overnight.
The biggest mining farms started fleeing China, heading to the cheapest energy sources on the planet. A lot of miners ended up in the United States.
Cambridge experts say that states like Texas can “boast some of the world’s lowest energy prices, which is a major incentive to miners who compete in a low-margin industry, where their only variable cost is typically energy”. The Cambridge data zeroes out China’s monthly average share of the global hashrate in June. This is a massive change from September 2020, when China captured about 67% of the market.
