May 20, 2022: -Bitcoin miners are not offered up in China even after Beijing’s ban on the practice. China has been the biggest crypto mining hub globally, accounting for 65% to 75% of the bitcoin network’s total “hash rate.”

But the share of global bitcoin mining capacity plunged to zero in July and August 2021, according to Cambridge University data, after authorities launched a crackdown on cryptocurrencies.

China took steps to cancel crypto mining, the power-intensive process leading to creating a renewed digital currency. That resulted in occasional miners fleeing to other countries, including the U.S. and Kazakhstan, bordering China.

But several underground mining operations have since appeared in China, with miners taking care to work around Beijing’s ban.

Recent research from the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance shows that Chinese bitcoin mining activity has rebounded. By September 2021, China made up over 22% of the bitcoin mining market, According to the data from Cambridge researchers.

China is a top global player in bitcoin mining, second to the U.S., which eclipsed China as the huge destination for the sector

in the previous year.

The research methodology relies on aggregate geolocation from massive bitcoin mining “pools,” combining computing resources to more effectively mine renewed tokens to determine where activity is concentrated in different countries.

Researchers said this approach might be vulnerable to “deliberate obfuscation” by some bitcoin miners using a virtual private network (VPN) to conceal their location. VPNs allow users to route their traffic through a server in one more country, making them handy tools for people in countries such as China, where internet usage is laboriously restricted.

Nevertheless, they added this limitation would “only moderately impact” the accuracy of the analysis.