China’s crackdown on Bitcoin (BTC) mining due to energy consumption concerns is widely regarded as the trigger for the miners’ exodus from Asia to Western countries. But new research by the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance suggests that the shift in mining power started before China’s renewed scrutiny.
Reuters reported that China’s total computing power connected to the Bitcoin network, or hash rate, fell from 75.5% in September 2019 to 46% in April 2021, before the Asian country even officially announced the mining crackdown.