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

CA judge rules Tesla lied about FSD, must fix marketing within 60 days

Published

3 hours ago

December 17, 2025

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CA judge rules Tesla lied about FSD, must fix marketing within 60 days

A California judge ruled late Tuesday afternoon that Tesla engaged in “deceptive marketing” in reference to its Full Self-Driving system, and that Tesla’s license to sell and produce cars in the state should be revoked for 30 days.

However, the California DMV has said it will give Tesla 60 days to comply and fix its marketing before going through with the suspension.

The ruling is big news in a case that has been ongoing for years now.

Tesla has been selling level 2 driver assist software since 2016 which it calls “Full Self-Driving” (FSD), despite that this software did not (and still does not) make its cars capable of driving themselves.

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This name has attracted much consternation over the years, becoming more absurd as each of Tesla’s predicted deadlines for the advent of full autonomy blow by.

Tesla also provides software under the name “Autopilot,” another term that evokes some level of autonomy, though perhaps not as explicitly as the aforementioned FSD. Tesla long held the position that this word is meant to evoke airplane-like systems that still require a pilot, but can just do most of the work for them.

So eventually, in 2021, the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) officially started an investigation into Tesla’s marketing claims, to determine whether the company had lied to consumers.

California found that the company was saying different things to the public than it was saying to the DMV.

The DMV then sent an official inquiry to Tesla in 2022, asking for it to respond to the claim that it was creating incorrect perceptions about the capabilities of its system. Tesla’s response stated that it had been allowed to lie about FSD for so long that it should get to keep going, which was apparently not persuasive enough to the courts, and the case was then slated for trial.

During this time, the California legislature got involved as well, passing a law that specifically banned automakers from deceiving consumers into thinking vehicles have more autonomous capabilities than they do.

Well, after all these investigations and waiting, we finally have an an answer, and the judge’s ruling makes it quite clear: Tesla lied to consumers about its autonomous capabilities.

California court rules Tesla lied about autonomy

The court looked at Tesla’s marketing claims and also at surveys of people exposed to those claims and their opinion of whether a Tesla would be able to drive itself, given the marketing messages put out by the company.

It found problems both with the word Autopilot and the phrase Full Self-Driving.

The word “Autopilot” was not found to be “unambiguously false,” but the court said that its use “follows a long but unlawful tradition of ‘intentionally (using) ambiguity to mislead consumers while maintaining some level of deniability about the intended meaning.’” The court found that a reasonable person could believe that a car on Autopilot doesn’t require their constant undivided attention, which is incorrect as the driver is still fully responsible for the vehicle.

On “Full Self-Driving,” the court was even more harsh. It found that this feature name is “actually, unambiguously false and counterfactual” (comically, Tesla tried to argue here that “no reasonable person” could believe that Full Self-Driving actually means Full Self-Driving).

The court noted other language used by Tesla, including marketing copy that said “the system is designed to be able to conduct short and long distance trips with no action required by the person in the driver’s seat,” and suggested that “legal reasons” are the only things holding Tesla back from full autonomy. Tesla tried to say that this was a statement of future intent, but the court found that its use of the present tense shows otherwise.

Tesla has repeatedly changed its wording around FSD, first calling it Full Self-Driving Capability, then changing that to Full Self-Driving (Supervised) to emphasize the need for a driver to supervise the vehicle. The court noted these changes, and then said it would not be a burden to force Tesla to change its marketing further to clarify that its cars do not drive themselves.

The DMV could now shut Tesla down for 30 days if it does not comply

Which leads us to the proposed legal remedy: the court said that the DMV could suspend or revoke Tesla’s licenses for 30 days, stopping its ability to sell or build cars in the state.

Tesla’s first factory is in Fremont, California, where it still builds around half a million vehicles a year and employs some ~20,000 employees. Tesla says this remedy would be “draconian,” but the court said that without this option, there’s no reason to believe Tesla would stop its misrepresentations to the public.

The court also examined the possibility of financial restitution, but deemed that inappropriate. Since the case did not establish any quantifiable financial harm done by Tesla’s misrepresentation and noted the impracticality of accounting for that harm.

This ruling does not yet mean that Tesla can’t sell cars in California, which is its largest market in the US by far. The court noted that the DMV has the option of suspension or revocation, which the DMV can do at its discretion. And the DMV has said that it will allow Tesla 60 days to comply with the order before it takes action, and that it would focus on Tesla’s dealer license rather than its manufacturing license.

This would mean, specifically, that Tesla not refer to a level 2 driving system as “Autopilot” or using language that suggests these vehicles are autonomous. It will have to change its marketing materials and stop making public statements misleading the public about its autonomous capabilities.

Tesla said after the ruling that “sales in California will continue uninterrupted.” But we’ll see what happens in 60 days, and what sort of changes Tesla does or does not make to its deceptive marketing.

Tuesday’s ruling is just one of many legal cases against Tesla right now, specifically having to do with FSD. One relevant case is a class action lawsuit in California claiming Tesla misled customers about its cars self-driving capabilities. This ruling could provide fuel for that lawsuit, given a California judge has already gone on the record with an official determination that Tesla misled the public about FSD.

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Environment

Rad Power Bikes files for bankruptcy, hoping to sell the company

Published

6 hours ago

December 17, 2025

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Rad Power Bikes files for bankruptcy, hoping to sell the company

Rad Power Bikes has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, marking a dramatic turn for one of the most recognizable names in the US electric bike industry. The Seattle-based company entered bankruptcy court this week as part of a plan to sell the business within the next 45–60 days, while continuing to operate during the process.

Court filings show Rad listing roughly $32.1 million in assets against $72.8 million in liabilities. A significant portion of that debt includes more than $8.3 million owed to US Customs and Border Protection for unpaid import tariffs, along with millions more owed to overseas manufacturing partners in China and Thailand. The company’s remaining inventory of e-bikes, spare parts, and accessories is valued at just over $14 million. Founder Mike Radenbaugh remains the largest equity holder, with just over 41% ownership.

The bankruptcy filing comes less than a month after the US Consumer Product Safety Commission issued a rare public warning urging consumers to immediately stop using certain older Rad lithium-ion batteries, citing fire risks, particularly when certain batteries are exposed to water and debris. Rad pushed back on the agency’s characterization, stating that its batteries were tested by third-party labs and deemed compliant with industry safety standards, and touting its SafeShield batteries – another, more recent version of Rad’s battery introduced last year that is likely one of the safest e-bike batteries in the industry.

Financial pressure had been building steadily on the company. In early November, Rad Power Bikes issued a WARN notice to Washington state officials, indicating that up to 64 employees could be laid off in January, and warning that the company could shut down entirely if additional funding was not secured. That notice now reads as an early signal of the restructuring that has followed.

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Chapter 11 bankruptcy is not the end of a company, and in this case, it allows Rad to continue operating while restructuring its debts under court supervision, pausing most litigation and collection efforts through an automatic stay. The company says it plans to keep selling bikes and supporting customers during the process as it works toward a sale.

The filing caps an unfortunate fall from grace for a brand that raised hundreds of millions of dollars in several funding rounds during the pandemic years. After years as a dominant force in the direct-to-consumer e-bike market, Rad now faces an uncertain future shaped by tightening margins, regulatory scrutiny, and unresolved legal and financial challenges.

via Bicycle Retailer

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Environment

Sunrun + NRG launch a virtual power plant to ease Texas power demand

Published

16 hours ago

December 16, 2025

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Sunrun + NRG launch a virtual power plant to ease Texas power demand

US's largest virtual power plant energy storage — Photo: Sunrun

As Texas braces for tighter power margins and record demand on the ERCOT grid, Sunrun and NRG Energy are transforming home batteries into a giant virtual power plant. The two companies are integrating more home battery storage into the grid and tapping those batteries when the state needs power the most.

The solar + storage provider and energy company announced a new multi-year partnership aimed at accelerating the adoption of distributed energy in Texas, with a focus on solar-plus-storage systems that can be aggregated and dispatched during periods of high demand. The idea is simple: use home batteries as a flexible, on‑demand power source to help meet Texas’s rapidly growing electricity needs.

Under the deal, Texas homeowners will be offered a bundled home energy setup that pairs Sunrun’s solar and battery systems with retail electricity plans from NRG’s Texas provider, Reliant. Customers will also get smart battery programming designed to optimize when their batteries charge and discharge. As new and existing Sunrun customers enroll with Reliant, their combined battery capacity will be made available to support the ERCOT grid during times of stress.

“This partnership is a major step in achieving our goal of creating a 1 GW virtual power plant by 2035,” said Brad Bentley, President of NRG Consumer. “By teaming up with Sunrun, we’re unlocking a new source of dispatchable, flexible energy while giving customers the opportunity to unlock value from their homes and contribute to a more resilient grid.”

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Sunrun, which has one of the largest fleets of residential batteries in the US, will be paid for aggregating the capacity, and participating Reliant customers will be compensated by Sunrun for sharing their stored solar energy.

The arrangement gives Texas households a way to earn money from their batteries while also improving grid reliability in a state that continues to see rapid population growth, extreme weather, and rising electricity demand.

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