According to local media reports, authorities from Baoshan’s city in Yunnan’s Chinese province are escalating efforts to crack down on Bitcoin miners, ordering electricity producers to cease supplying power to the city’s crypto miners. Chinese crypto reporter Colin Wu tweeted that several miners had informed him of the ban, sharing what appear to be scanned copies of official documents issued to power producers. China has been cracking down on crypto businesses as the central bank prepares to launch the digital yen.
“The ban was probably informed by localized economic interests.”
The local crypto journalist Colin Wu noted that the ban was probably informed by the localized “economic interests” and probably does not indicate a desire to quash crypto mining on the part of Beijing. “There is no need to overestimate the impact of this incident. The attitude of China local power companies towards crypto mining is often changing. It is more because of the demand for economic interests than political pressure.” The ban appears to have coincided with a 24-hour drop-in global hash rate of roughly 10% from 140 exahashes per second to 125 EX/s, though the correlation is far from causation.
Several miners told Wu that Baoshan, Yunnan, where China’s crypto mines are located, received a ban on November 30, requiring the power station to stop supplying power to the miners. Yunnan is the third largest mining place in China after Sichuan and Xinjiang. pic.twitter.com/1zAhcTLmXi
— Wu Blockchain（Chinese Crypto Reporter） (@WuBlockchain) November 30, 2020
Yunnan is China’s fourth-largest region by mining hash rate.
According to Cambridge University’s Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index, or BECI, Yunnan was China’s fourth-largest region by mining hash rate, behind Xinjian, Sichuan, and Inner Mongolia as of April 2020. Yunnan represented 5.42% of the global hash rate — ranking it above all countries except for China, the United States, Russia, and Kazakhstan. China has also been cracking down on the crypto businesses as the People’s Bank of China gears up to roll out the national digital currency. Earlier this year, Yunnan’s government had reportedly ordered 64 unauthorized mining operations to shut down, including seven that were still under construction.
