Bitcoin “mining” in Sichuan was demolished, the price of VGA in China “collapsed”

The bust of Bitcoin mining in China has brought joy to computer gamers – graphics card prices are plummeting as the components needed for this cryptocurrency mining operation are no longer available in China. Country.

The Nvidia Quadro P1000 VGA, the company’s low-end graphics card line, which used to cost up to $464 in May – before China launched a crackdown on cryptocurrency mining – is now only $376. on JD.com on Monday morning.

The Asus RTX3060 VGA, the more advanced line of graphics cards, which used to cost nearly $ 2100 in May, has now more than halved, to only about $ 727 when for sale on Alibaba’s Tmall page. These price changes are tracked by market intelligence provider Manmanbuy.

In the past, the main use of graphics cards was just to support the computer in graphics processing capabilities, such as gaming or graphics-heavy applications. But for cryptocurrency mining, the graphics card becomes a vital component as it helps to speed up the processing of cryptographic hash functions, the complex algorithms used to generate cryptocurrencies. as well as verifying transactions on the blockchain. The more computing power a miner has, the more likely they are to beat others to add new blocks to the blockchain and win cryptocurrency rewards.

This deep drop in price stems from the bust of crypto mining in Sichuan, which is rich in Hydroelectricity and has become a Bitcoin mining paradise in China. Previously, local regulators also gave green light to crypto miners to take advantage of the abundant electricity in the region. Not only Sichuan, other regions such as Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang also have similar moves to take advantage of their electricity prices.

But now, these regions are no longer miner-friendly. Not only suffering from a drop in revenue when cryptocurrency prices have dropped 40% from their peak in May, the crackdown by the Chinese government also makes it difficult for the cryptocurrency mining industry in this country to survive. .

This month, Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang as well as Sichuan have all issued notices asking cryptocurrency miners to stop their operations. They also require electricity providers to monitor their customers for crypto mining involvement and report the results by the end of this month.

Until the bust, these provinces accounted for a significant portion of the hash rate on the global bitcoin network — a measure of the cryptocurrency’s network’s computing power. According to figures from the Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption in April 2020, Sichuan alone accounted for 36% of the global. In total, China controlled 65% of the network hash rate at the time.

The drop in China’s cryptocurrency mining activity also affects the whole world. According to Btc.com, now Bitcoin’s average daily hash rate has dropped to 104 exahash/second within the last 24 hours (one exahash is equal to 1 billion billion), while 3 days earlier, this number was 110 exahash/sec and last week was 120 exahash/sec. In April, this number reached 200 exahash/second.

Refer to SCMP