Bitcoin’s hash rate grows 3x since China ban despite crypto winter

Despite the cryptocurrency sector still scrambling to surpass the $1 trillion market capitalization mark, the mining power of its largest asset – Bitcoin (BTC) – continues to grow and reach new highs seemingly every week.

Indeed, the Bitcoin hash rate has reached a new record, climbing to three times higher than the lows it reached during the China mining ban, crypto research and proprietary trading firm Reflexivity Research said on October 5.

Only days after Finbold reported on its previous all-time high (and a little over a week before that), Bitcoin’s mining power has advanced even further, standing at 248.826 million terahashes per second (TH/s) as of October 5, according to Blockchain.com data.

It is worth noting that, on July 2, 2021, amid the widely publicized crackdown by the Chinese government on cryptocurrency, which culminated with a country-wide ban on crypto mining, Bitcoin’s hash rate had dropped to a low of 86.292 million TH/s.

The recent increase in miner confidence can, in part, be attributed to investors ditching fiat currencies like the euro and pound en masse and turning to crypto assets like Bitcoin and Ethereum (ETH), which has led to a three-month high in Bitcoin trading volume and a steady increase in the number of Bitcoin holders.

Cracks in the Chinese crypto crackdown

As a reminder, China’s crypto ban took place in stages, starting in May 2021 when the government prohibited financial institutions from engaging in crypto trading. In June, it effectively banned all domestic crypto mining.

Despite the mining ban, data from June 2022 has shown that nearly 100 reachable Bitcoin nodes securing the Bitcoin network were still running on the territory of China at the time, as Finbold reported. At press time, this number stood at 78 nodes, as per Bitrawr data.

Interestingly, the crackdown and ban on all crypto-related services hasn’t stopped China from ranking among the top ten countries in the adoption of digital assets, with an index score of 0.535 positioning it in the tenth place (from the 13th last year) among all countries in crypto adoption.

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