RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – China triggered a veritable exodus of cryptocurrency mining machines, first and foremost to the United States, Canada, Kazakhstan, and Russia, but also countries such as Venezuela and Paraguay for more obsolete equipment, writes Financial Times.
Since Beijing launched a campaign against bitcoin last May, 14 of the world’s largest cryptocurrency miners relocated more than two million pieces of equipment to other countries, mainly the US, Canada, Kazakhstan, and Russia.
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For example, Chinese companies Bitfufu and BIT Mining sent 80,000 and 7,849 machines, respectively, to Kazakhstan.
Another beneficiary of that move was Russia, which hosts some 1.8 million machines from China, according to estimates by Moscow-based cryptocurrency miner BitRiver.
Moving older mining equipment like Antminer S9 to the U.S. is uneconomical, older generation machines end up in countries like Venezuela or Paraguay, less rigid from a regulatory standpoint and with cheap electricity.
For the co-founder of the Venezuelan mining company Doctor Miner, Juan José Pinto, the Chinese ban “is a great opportunity”.
Three large companies from the Asian giant contacted his company, located in Caracas, to relocate some 7,000 machines. “If we had resources, we could house many more,” Pinto said.
They are obsolete machines and more prone to breakdowns, but Pinto and his staff take advantage of that “graveyard”: if they have a device with four broken parts and another with six damaged parts, they assemble them into a good one.
Digital Assets, based in Asunción, also plans to house 15,500 mining machines in the coming months. However, some individuals in Paraguay are already beginning to compete with it by acquiring devices to mine autonomously.
According to the newspaper, small mining farms help survive in an economy as battered as Venezuela. “People mine in their homes with a single machine,” Pinto said. “There are thousands of people here with small farms. Earning an extra US$100 a month makes a big difference to them,” he added.