Written by

Jaran Mellerud

Analyst

Archived Articles

18 Oct 2021

The U.S. becomes the world’s largest bitcoin miner

Source: CBECI

The Bitcoin mining industry was severely disrupted when over 50% of the hashpower went offline in May. Fortunately, coupled with an ever-increasing bitcoin price, 2021 has turned out to be a very lucrative year for bitcoin miners. Natural protocol incentives have induced a remarkable path to hashrate-recovery: the U.S. alone accounted for 35.4% of the global hashrate at the end of August—up from 16.8% at the end of April.

The Bitcoin mining industry was severely disrupted when over 50% of the hashpower went offline in May. Fortunately, coupled with an ever-increasing bitcoin price, 2021 has turned out to be a very lucrative year for bitcoin miners. Natural protocol incentives have induced a remarkable path to hashrate-recovery: the U.S. alone accounted for 35.4% of the global hashrate at the end of August—up from 16.8% at the end of April. Kazakhstan and Russia are following the U.S. and now account for 18.1% and 11% of global hashrate, respectively, up from 8.2% and 6.8% in April. It should be noted that Mainland China likely still has some rogue miners mining in the shadows despite the recent crackdowns. Nevertheless, Chinese miners account for a fraction of what they did a few months ago, making Bitcoin's ties to China less relevant today than earlier.