The White House’s Bitcoin Mining Tax Undermines Itself

In fact, many miners who were using abundant hydro power in the Yunnan or Sichuan provinces moved to Kazakhstan, which has a highly fossil-fueled power grid. Today, the U.S. composes roughly 30-40% of global Bitcoin mining (the best data we have comes from Cambridge University, but it’s somewhat dated and imprecise). The most popular other countries are, in rough order, China (yes, despite the ban, there’s about  17% of hashrate in China), Russia, Canada, Kazakhstan, Indonesia, Paraguay, Norway and Venezuela. We also know that Bitcoin mining directly finances the governments of Russia, Iran, Venezuela and North Korea. These regimes use Bitcoin mining for sanctions evasion, to turn their mineral wealth into cash. Attacking domestic miners in the U.S. hashrate simply means that other miners are more profitable on net, because their share of the pie is bigger.