The key misunderstanding with China’s purported BTC hashrate dominance

CryptoQuant founder Ki Young Ju recently sparked a debate within the crypto community by claiming that China currently controls 55% of the Bitcoin (BTC) network hashrate — which misses a critical point about miner distribution.

Bitcoin mining pools such as Antpool, F2pool, MARA Pool, and Foundry have management teams or are headquartered within a specific country. However, the miners, which contribute hashrate to the pool, are geographically distributed. This means Chinese mining pools include miners from all around the globe — including the United States.

According to a recent analysis from TheMinerMag, two US-based mining pools — MARA Pool and the USA Foundry Pool — mined 33.6% of all blocks in August 2024. The hashrate coming from these pools doesn’t reflect US-based miners that have joined a mining pool operating in a different country.

Moreover, due to the somewhat opaque nature of Bitcoin mining, attempting to locate the exact geographic breakdown of hashrate is difficult — adding a level of nuance to the global hashrate wars.

Related: China still controls 55% of Bitcoin hashrate despite crypto ban

Chinese government signals shift in crypto policy?

China passed a blanket ban on cryptocurrency activities in 2021, but in July 2024, rumors began to circulate that mainland China would unban Bitcoin — leaving the crypto community divided on the veracity of the rumors.

In January 2024, the Chinese government announced a new anti-money laundering framework that will take effect in 2025 and include provisions to combat money laundering through digital assets.

More recently, China’s Legislative Affairs Commission considered revising an earlier ruling from China’s Supreme People’s Court to establish methods of monitoring new financial technology for money laundering.

At the time, Legislative Affairs Commission spokesperson Wang Xiang explained that financial institutions would also be held responsible for gauging the new risks posed by emerging technologies and evaluating new business models that arise from nascent technologies.

The newly proposed Anti-Money Laundering regulatory framework also seeks collaboration from China’s central bank and other financial institutions to offer guidelines on combatting the perceived money laundering risks from emerging financial technologies like cryptocurrencies and digital assets.

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