China is kicking out more than half the world’s bitcoin miners – and a whole lot of them could be headed to Texas

Published

4 years ago

June 19, 2021

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Technicians make repairs to bitcoin mining machines at a mining facility operated by Bitmain in Ordos, Inner Mongolia, China, on Friday, Aug. 11, 2017.

Qilai Shen | Bloomberg | Getty Images

China has long been home to more than half the world’s bitcoin miners, but now, Beijing wants them out ASAP.

In May, the government called for a severe crackdown on bitcoin mining and trading, setting off what’s being dubbed in crypto circles as “the great mining migration.” This exodus is underway now, and it could be a game changer for Texas.

Mining is the energy-intensive process which both creates new coins and maintains a log of all transactions of existing digital tokens.

Despite a lack of reserves that caused days-long blackouts last winter, Texas often has some of the world’s lowest energy prices, and its share of renewables is growing over time, with 20% of its power coming from wind as of 2019. It has a deregulated power grid that lets customers choose between power providers, and crucially, its political leaders are very pro-crypto – dream conditions for a miner looking for a kind welcome and cheap energy sources.

“You are going to see a dramatic shift over the next few months,” said Brandon Arvanaghi, previously a security engineer at crypto exchange Gemini. “We have governors like Greg Abbott in Texas who are promoting mining. It is going to become a real industry in the United States, which is going to be incredible.”

China’s mining dominance

2021 data for the global distribution of mining power is not yet available, but past estimates have shown that 65% to 75% of the world’s bitcoin mining happened in China – mostly in four Chinese provinces: Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, Sichuan, and Yunnan. Sichuan and Yunnan’s hydropower make them renewable energy meccas, while Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia are home to many of China’s coal plants.

The drawdown in miners has already begun in Inner Mongolia. After failing to meet Beijing’s climate targets, province leaders decided to give bitcoin miners two months to clear out, explicitly blaming its energy misses on crypto mines.

Castle Island Ventures founding partner Nic Carter says that while it’s not totally clear how China will handle next steps, it a phased rollout is likely. “It seems like we’re going from policy statement to actual implementation in relatively short order,” he said.

The way this exodus is measured is by looking at hashrate, an industry term used to describe the computing power of all miners in the bitcoin network.

“Given the drop in hashrate, it appears likely that installations are being turned off throughout the country,” continued Carter, who also thinks that probably 50 to 60% of bitcoin’s entire hashrate will ultimately leave China.

Although China’s announcement hasn’t been cemented in policy, that isn’t stopping miners like Alejandro De La Torre from cutting their losses and making an exit.

“We do not want to face every single year, some sort of new ban coming in China,” said De La Torre, vice president of Hong Kong-headquartered mining pool, Poolin. “So we’re trying to diversify our global mining hashrate, and that’s why we are moving to the United States and to Canada.”

One of bitcoin’s greatest features is that it is totally location agnostic. Miners only require an internet connection, unlike other industries that must be relatively close to their end users.

“The cool thing about bitcoin that is under appreciated by a lot of the naysayers is that it’s a portable market; you can bring it right to the source of energy,” explained Steve Barbour, founder of Upstream Data, a company that manufactures and supplies portable mining solutions for oil and gas facilities.

That said, the exodus won’t be instantaneous, in part, because it will take miners some time to either move their machines out of China or liquidate their assets and set up shop elsewhere.

Where they’re going

Because miners at scale compete in a low-margin industry, where their only variable cost is typically energy, they are incentivized to migrate to the world’s cheapest sources of power.

“Every Western mining host I know has had their phones ringing off the hook,” said Carter. “Chinese miners or miners that were domiciled in China are looking to Central Asia, Eastern Europe, the U.S., and Northern Europe.”

One likely destination is China’s next-door neighbor, Kazakhstan. The country’s coal mines provide a cheap and abundant energy supply. It also helps that Kazakhstan has a more lax attitude to building, which bodes well for miners who need to construct physical installations in a short period of time.

Didar Bekbauov runs Xive, a company that provides hosting services to international miners. Xive also sells the specialized equipment needed for mining.

Bekbauov says that he’s stopped counting the number of Chinese miners who have called him to ask about relocation options, ranging from operations with 15 rigs to thousands.

“One miner told us that only government electricity plants have restricted mining and private ones will continue to service miners,” Bekbauov told CNBC.

“But most of the electricity is generated by government power plants, so miners will have to move. That makes them uncertain and desperate to find other locations,” he said.

Whether Kazakhstan is a destination or simply a stopover on a longer migration west remains to be seen.

Arvanaghi is bullish on North America and thinks the hashrate there will grow over the next few months.

“Texas not only has the cheapest electricity in the U.S. but some of the cheapest in the globe,” he said. “It’s also very easy to start up a mining company…if you have $30 million, $40 million, you can be a premier miner in the United States.”

Wyoming has also trended toward being pro-bitcoin and could be another mining destination, according to Arvanaghi.

There are, however, a few major limitations to the U.S. becoming a global mining destination.

For one, the lead time to build the actual physical infrastructure necessary to host miners is likely six to nine months, Carter told CNBC. “The U.S. probably can’t be as nimble as other countries in terms of onshoring these stray miners,” he said.

The move logistics may also prove difficult. There is a shipping container shortage, thanks to the tailwinds of the Covid pandemic.

But perhaps the biggest question is the reliability of the Texas power grid. A storm that devastated large swaths of the state in 2020 has reignited a debate over whether Texas should winter-proof its systems, a potentially costly project that might affect taxes or other fees for those looking to tap into the state’s power grid. More recently, ERCOT, the organization that operates Texas’ grid, asked consumers to conserve energy amid what officials called an unusual number of “forced generation outages” and an upcoming heat wave.

Answering the Musk critique

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has bashed bitcoin mining, claiming that it is bad for the environment. It’s not a new criticism.

For years, skeptics have maligned the world’s most popular digital token for polluting the planet, while supporters have extolled the virtues of bitcoin and its role in accelerating the rise of renewable energy.

It is unclear whether the China mining exodus will make or break the case for bitcoin enthusiasts in the debate around the token’s carbon footprint. The dominant narrative, to date, has been that much of the world’s bitcoin is mined with Chinese goal.

“From a narrative perspective, it’s definitely an improvement,” said Carter. “But China also has the most abundant stranded hydro resources in the world.”

The country offers significant energy vectors from wind, solar, and especially hydropower in the south. Xinjiang’s grid, for example, is 35% powered by wind and solar energy inputs.

If all the miners do end up leaving China, it will mean less fossil fuel-powered mining, but it will also mean that the network’s share of renewable energy-powered mining will drop. This is why the question of where these migrant miners end up could prove critical to bitcoin’s future. “It’s the biggest story of the year for bitcoin,” said Carter.

De La Torre says they’re looking to expand operations using green energy, a trend that is already years in the making. He says that hydro plants are generally cheaper than fossil fuels in most parts of the world.

“Mining is price sensitive, so as to seek out the lowest cost power and the lowest cost power tends to be renewable because if you’re burning fossil fuels…it has extraction, refinement, and transport costs,” explained Blockstream CEO Adam Back.

Lazard

Each year, investment bank Lazard releases a breakdown of energy costs by source. Its 2020 report shows that many of the most common renewable energy sources are either equal to or less expensive than conventional energy sources like coal and gas. And the cost of renewable power keeps going down.

But there are limitations to running crypto mines purely on renewable energy.

Though solar and wind are now the world’s least expensive energy sources, both power supplies face limitations at scale, so there is concern over the viability of miners turning exclusively to wind or solar energy.

Next six months

For the time being, there isn’t that much mining capacity worldwide that is ready to absorb the Chinese miner diaspora. While they scramble to find a new home, we could see hashrate go offline – and stay offline.

In practice, that would mean all the remaining miners are more profitable for a period of time.

Having more geographic dispersion would even out the global balance of power, and it would also reduce the ability of any one sovereign nation to co-opt or control the network.

We may also see special crypto economic zones pop up in the next few months.

“You will see jurisdictions adopting a very favorable stance and creating the equivalent of special zones to encourage miners to host locally,” said Carter. “We’re seeing it at the state level here. You’re also gonna see it at the country level, you might even see subsidized electricity for mining.”

Environment

Wheel-E Podcast: Rad’s sunset, Onewheel minibike, flatbet e-trike, and more

Published

4 hours ago

November 21, 2025

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Wheel-E Podcast: Rad's sunset, Onewheel minibike, flatbet e-trike, and more

This week on Electrek’s Wheel-E podcast, we discuss the most popular news stories from the world of electric bikes and other nontraditional electric vehicles. This time, that includes the potential end of Rad Power Bikes, Tern’s new belt-drive Vektron, a semi-solid-state e-bike battery coming soon on a production e-bike, ALSO drops price on its entry-level model, a tilting flat-bed electric trike/truck, and more.

The Wheel-E podcast returns every two weeks on Electrek’s YouTube channel, Facebook, Linkedin, and Twitter.

As a reminder, we’ll have an accompanying post, like this one, on the site with an embedded link to the live stream. Head to the YouTube channel to get your questions and comments in.

After the show ends, the video will be archived on YouTube and the audio on all your favorite podcast apps:

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We also have a Patreon if you want to help us to avoid more ads and invest more in our content. We have some awesome gifts for our Patreons and more coming.

Here are a few of the articles that we will discuss during the Wheel-E podcast today:

Here’s the live stream for today’s episode starting at 9:00 a.m. ET (or the video after 10:00 a.m. ET):

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Environment

Electricity is about to become the new base currency and China figured it out

Published

6 hours ago

November 21, 2025

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Electricity is about to become the new base currency and China figured it out

For most of human history, currency was a direct claim on tangible, productive output. Before the abstraction of government fiat or cryptocurrency, value was stored in things that required real work and resources, bushels of grain, livestock, gold, assets with their own direct productive output: horses, and tragically, slaves.

These were the foundational assets of economies, representing a direct link between labor, resources, and stored value.

As we accelerate into an all-electric, all-digital age, this fundamental link is re-emerging, but with a new unit of account. The 21st-century economy, defined by automated industry, robotic, electric transport, and now power-hungry artificial intelligence, runs on a single, non-negotiable input: electricity. In this new paradigm, the real base currency, the ultimate representation of productive capacity, is the kilowatt-hour (kWh).

The kWh is the new economic base layer.

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Last week, I was in Bijiashan Park at night overlooking Shenzhen, arguably the most technologically advanced city on earth, built over the previous few decades, partly on cheap electricity, cheap labor, and manufacturing innovations.

I could see the giant high-voltage power lines coming over Yinhu Mountain to power the constant light show that is Shenzhen at night. I couldn’t help but think about how cheap electricity and a strong grid have been critical to China’s exceptional economic rise.

As you stroll around the city, you see power everywhere. There are charging stations at every corner, including insane 1 MW charging posts, electric cars and trucks, trucks that carry batteries to electric scooter shops, which are also literally everywhere.

Everything moves on electric power. Industries are powered by electricity, and now, with the advent of AI, virtually everything is increasingly processed by LLMs, which are ultimately powered by electricity through power-hungry data centers.

In a world where everything runs on electricity, electricity itself becomes the currency of civilization.

It is measurable, divisible, storable, and universal – all qualities that a currency needs, but unlike fiat and crypto, it’s actually directly linked to productive output. No politics. No inflation. Just physics.

This concept is not merely academic; it appears to be the quiet, guiding principle in China. While others debate the merits of decentralized digital tokens, China is executing a multi-pronged strategy that treats electricity as the foundational strategic asset it has become.

First, China is building the “mint” for this new currency at an incredible, world-changing scale, and it has retained absolute state control over its distribution. Its deployment of new electricity generation, particularly from renewables, is staggering. The country met its 2030 target of 1,200 gigawatts of renewable capacity five years early, in 2025.

In 2024 alone, renewable energy accounted for a record 56% of the nation’s total installed capacity, with clean generation meeting 84% of all new demand.

Here’s a comparison of electricity generation between China and the US:

If this chart doesn’t scare the West. I don’t know what will. The trend is not reversing any time soon. In fact, it appears to be accelerating as China is doubling down on solar and nuclear.

State-owned monoliths manage this entire system, primarily the State Grid Corporation of China (SGCC), the world’s largest utility. For better or worse, this centralized control allows the state to execute massive national strategies impossible in a liberalized market, such as building an Ultra-High-Voltage (UHV) grid to transmit power from remote solar and wind farms in the west to the power-hungry industrial hubs on its coast.

Second, China wields its control over the grid as a precision tool of industrial policy. China’s average electricity rate of $0.084/kWh is cheaper than most of the rest of the world, but its power lies not in the base price but in its strategic application. The government deploys a “Differential Electricity Pricing” policy: a “stick” that penalizes low-tech, high-consumption industries with higher rates, and a “carrot” that provides preferential pricing to incentivize strategic sectors.

The most potent example is in the AI sector. China is now offering massive electricity subsidies, cutting power bills by up to half, for data centers run by giants like Alibaba and Tencent. The condition for this cheap power is that these companies must use locally-made, Chinese AI chips, such as those from Huawei.

China is spending its “electricity currency” to directly fund the growth of its domestic AI chip industry and sever its dependence on foreign technology. This same logic applies to its global dominance in green tech, where state-subsidized firms like BYD benefit from a state-controlled industrial ecosystem built on reliable, managed power.

Third, and possibly the most explicit exemplification of China viewing electricity as the base currency is its moves against cryptocurrency.

In 2021, the government banned all cryptocurrency transactions and mining. While the official reasons cited financial stability, the move might have had a deeper, strategic intention.

From the state’s perspective, it was a tool for capital flight, allowing wealth to bypass government controls. But in a world where electricity rules, cryptocurrencies are, in effect, a competing “currency” that burns the foundational asset (electricity) to create a decentralized store of value.

By banning crypto, China simultaneously reclaimed its monopoly on economic control and shut down a massive, “wasteful” leak of its most precious resource. It freed up that generating capacity to be strategically allocated to its preferred industries, like AI and manufacturing.

China’s actions, viewed together, are a clear and coherent strategy. By massively investing in and securing total state control over its domestic electricity supply (the “mint”), using its price as a tool to fuel strategic industries, and banning decentralized competitors that consume the same resource, China is making a clear bet. It has been recognized that in an age where all productivity is powered by the grid, the ultimate source of national power is not gold, fiat, or crypto, but the state-controlled kilowatt-hour.

The Blockchain and Crypto: Ledger vs. Furnace

This perspective brings a critical nuance to the role of blockchain technology. In an economy where electricity is the base currency, the blockchain makes perfect sense, but only as a ledger, not as a store of value.

A distributed ledger is the ideal technological layer to act as the accounting system for this new economy. It can track the generation, transmission, and consumption of every kilowatt-hour with perfect transparency. It can automate complex industrial contracts and manage the grid’s load balancing without a central intermediary. In this sense, blockchain is the “banking software” for the electricity standard.

However, “Proof of Work” cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin face a fatal contradiction within this paradigm. They aim to serve as a store of value by burning the base currency (electricity) to secure the network. If the kilowatt-hour is the 21st-century equivalent of gold, then Bitcoin mining is akin to melting down gold bars to print a paper receipt. It destroys the productive asset to create a derivative token.

Bitcoin is quickly losing credibility as a classical safe store of value. It trades like a security, at least over the last year, and its value is only whatever the next moron is willing to pay, with no valuable asset behind it.

China’s strategy reflects this precise understanding. While they ruthlessly banned Bitcoin mining (the “furnace” that wastes the asset), they have simultaneously championed the Blockchain-based Service Network (BSN) and the Digital Yuan. They have embraced the ledger to track and control their energy economy, while rejecting the supposed asset that destroys it.

This is a trap that crypto fans often fall into. They recognize the value of the blockchain, which is real, but they mistakenly broadly assign the same value to cryptocurrency, which is simply an application of the blockchain.

Electrek’s Take

What I’m trying to explore in this op-ed is the idea that if the present is electric and the future is even more electric, then it makes sense for electricity to be the foundation of the economy.

If electricity is the backbone of global trade and the metric of productivity, the kWh ultimately becomes the real currency of a truly electrified world.

And I think China has figured this out, as evidenced by its new electricity generation surpassing the rest of the world combined and by its ban on cryptocurrency.

They are going to let the rest of the world hold the crypto bag while they have more electricity generation than anyone to power their industries, which are already taking over the world.

I think the rest of the world should learn from this. Instead of pouring capital into meme coins and made-up stores of value, we should invest in electricity generation and storage.

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Environment

Oil prices and energy stocks fall sharply on Trump’s new Ukraine peace plan

Published

7 hours ago

November 21, 2025

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Oil prices and energy stocks fall sharply on Trump’s new Ukraine peace plan

This aerial picture shows the oil tanker Boracay anchored off the Atlantic Coast off Saint-Nazaire, western France on October 1st, 2025. French authorities said Wednesday they were investigating the oil tanker Boracay anchored off the Atlantic Coast and suspected of being part of Russia’s clandestine “shadow fleet”.

Damien Meyer | Afp | Getty Images

Oil prices extended declines and energy stocks fell sharply on Friday morning as U.S. President Donald Trump pushed for a peace deal to end the long-running Russia-Ukraine war.

International benchmark Brent crude futures with January expiry slipped 2% to $62.09 per barrel at 11:02 a.m. London time (6:02 a.m. ET), after dipping 0.2% in the previous session. The contract is down more 16% so far this year.

U.S. West Texas Intermediate futures with January expiry were last seen 2.4% lower at $57.61, after closing Thursday off 0.5%.

Europe’s Stoxx Oil and Gas index, meanwhile, led losses during morning deals, down more than 2.7%. Britain’s Shell and BP were both trading around 1.6% lower, while Germany’s Siemens Energy fell more than 8%.

U.S. oil giants Exxon Mobil and Chevron were 0.4% and 0.2% lower, respectively, during premarket trade.

The bearish market sentiment comes as investors pore over the details of the Trump administration’s push to secure a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine.

The U.S., under a widely leaked plan, has reportedly proposed that Ukraine cede land including Crimea, Luhansk and Donetsk, and pledge never to join the NATO military alliance.

The plan also says Kyiv will receive “reliable” security guarantees, while the size of the Ukrainian Armed Forces will be limited to 600,000 personnel, according to The Associated Press, which obtained a copy of the draft proposal. CNBC has not been able to independently verify the report.

Analysts were doubtful that the peace plan, which is thought to be favorable toward Russia, would be backed by Ukraine.

Guntram Wolff, senior fellow at Bruegel, a Brussels-based think tank, was among those skeptical about whether the proposed peace plan could lead to a deal.

“I think it’s always good to talk each other so in that sense it’s a good development but I have to say when I saw the details of this supposed peace plan, I really don’t think it can fly,” Wolff told CNBC’s “Europe Early Edition” on Friday.

“Because at the core, what it says is that Ukraine should give up significant parts of its military personnel, meaning the military personnel would decrease by something like a third from 900,000 to 600,000,” he added.

A general view of a PJSC Lukoil Oil Company storage tank at an oil terminal located on the Chaussee de Vilvorde on October 30, 2025 in Brussels, Belgium.

Thierry Monasse | Getty Images News | Getty Images

Alongside the peace plan noise, energy market participants closely monitored the potential impact of U.S. sanctions against Russian oil producers Rosneft and Lukoil, with the measures taking effect from Friday, a stronger U.S. dollar and expectations for the Federal Reserve’s upcoming interest rate decision.