Sources estimate ~20% of the world's bitcoin miners remain in China, after moving operations underground following the country's crypto mining ban in May
Context & Ripple Effects
China's May 2021 mining ban triggered one of the largest industrial relocations in crypto: analysis showed 14 of the biggest mining companies moved over 2 million machines out of the country, with a majority heading to Russia, and players like Bit Digital shipping rigs to Canada and the US. The official story was that China had exited bitcoin mining entirely.
CNBC's sourcing punctures that story: roughly 20% of the world's miners are estimated to still be operating inside China, having moved underground rather than abroad. That reframes the exodus as partial — and lines up with later research showing China's global hashrate share actually grew to 21.1% between September 2021 and January 2022 despite the ban.
First-order effects
- The miners who stayed now run covert operations outside licensed channels — off-grid or disguised power use — trading legal certainty for continued access to cheap electricity.
- The relocation economics shift for those who left: companies that paid to move hardware to Russia and the US did so against competitors who never left, keeping their cost base intact.
Second-order effects
- The US-bound migration — driven by political stability, cheap capital, and abundant power — becomes less decisive as a competitive moat if a fifth of global hashrate never left China's cost advantage.
- Chinese provincial energy authorities face unmeasured electricity demand from illegal operations, complicating grid planning and enforcement of the ban itself.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, bans suppress visible mining rather than eliminate it — consistent with Hashrate Index data showing China's share rebounding to 14% by late October 2025, making it the world's third-largest miner four years after the ban.
- Structurally, hashrate geography becomes a measurement problem: reported national shares understate covert capacity, weakening the decentralization claims that jurisdictions like the US used to court miners.
The trend: China's mining ban relocated hashrate to stable jurisdictions like the US and Russia while pushing a persistent underground share into hiding, making measured hashrate distribution an increasingly unreliable map of where mining actually happens.