The man shooting the video wears a facemask, rimless glasses and a white hard hat. He is traipsing near the entrance of a warehouse full to the brim with stacks of internet-connected machines sitting idle in half-darkness. As the man turns the camera around to showcase the machines, he says in Mandarin, “This is the stock for you. It hasn’t even started mining bitcoin”. The video, a sales pitch received via text by a cryptocurrency entrepreneur based in Switzerland, is just one of many similar messages that have been flowing out of China over the past two weeks.
China has long been the world’s epicentre of bitcoin mining, an energy-guzzling process to secure the cryptocurrency network and mint new bitcoins via specialised machines known as “mining rigs”. According to the University of Cambridge s Centre for Alternative Finance, over 65 per cent of miners working on the bitcoin blockchain were based in China as of April 2021. But Chinese miners are now on tenterhooks foll