China has not been easy on cryptocurrencies since last year and moved on to ban ICOs in September. That led to exchanges and cryptocurrency trading platforms stopping to register new users from the country and indeed close down.
Before crackdowns, China accounted for more than two-thirds of world’s Bitcoin mining operations.
Indeed, local authorities are preventing expansion of mining operations and even started to shut down mines late last year.
And now, Chinese crypto mining firms are considering a move to Canada to set up operations there. One such company is Bitmain Technologies which operates some of the largest mining farms in China. The company is considering establishing minings sites in Canada’s Québec province and is in talks with regional power authorities on the same.
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Hydro Quebec, a public utility in the area said there is energy surplus in the province — an equivalent of 100 Terawatt hours over ten years. One terawatt hour powers about 60,000 homes in Québec during one year.
“Mining companies are eyeing operations from about 20 megawatts, the size of a data centre, to sites as large as 300 megawatts, about the size of a small aluminum smelter,” said David Vincent, the director of business development at Hydro Québec distribution.
The company is also considering expanding operations in Switzerland.
ZQMiner has a plan of moving to overseas.
“We, and from what I understand many of our peers, are already making plans to go overseas,”
said Li Wei, chief executive of ZQMiner, a Wuhan-based company which sells bitcoin mining equipment and has mines in three Chinese provinces.
Beijing feared that Chinese citizens were using cryptocurrencies to move cash abroad. One banker has defended the move to shut ICOs and clamp down on cryptocurrencies.
“If we didn’t shut bitcoin exchanges and crack down on initial coin offerings a few months ago, and if more than 80 percent of the world’s bitcoin transactions and financing activities were still taking place in China, which was the case back in January, what would it be like today? It’s scary to think about,” said the banker as quoted by Chinese business daily Yicai.
Source of the article: https://coinpedia.org/news/bitcoin-miners-china-considering-moving-operations-canada/
