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A team affiliated with the University of Cambridge has released a new bitcoin data tool that shows the countries with the highest concentration of mining.
The Cambridge Center for Alternative Finance (CCAF), which is based at Cambridge Judge Business School, said on Wednesday that the Bitcoin Mining Map will display the countries’ global hashrate monthly share for the first time, as well as provide more in-depth data to compare. the Chinese provinces.
On a global scale, the map shows that China accounts for 65% of the total global hashrate, with the United States and Russia back at 7%. Although China still holds the lead, its hashrate share has dropped by around 10% since September.
The data comes from three mining pools – BTC.com, Poolin and ViaBTC – and it took seven months to develop. Blandin said it accounts for about 37% of the total global hashrate and may be too skewed compared to North America and Europe. They hope to link data from multiple pools and mining entities to create a more complete picture.
“This data can validate some market insights, drive greater transparency and help participants conduct their operations,” Apolline Blandin, cryptocurrency and blockchain from CCAF, told CoinDesk in an email. “From a research perspective, both academic and industrial, these data can help better calibrate and fit the parameters of researchers’ models.”
Many miners use virtual private networks (VPNs) to mask IP addresses and can make it more difficult to locate locations. On the methodology page, the CCAF said it noted that this was particularly important in Zhejiang Province. “To mitigate this effect, we divided the hashrate of Zhejiang province proportionally among the other Chinese provinces listed in the pool dataset,” it reads.
The CCAF mining map also shows Xinjiang as the Chinese province with the highest concentration of hashrate, in conflict with cryptocurrency manager CoinShares, which has positioned the southern province of Sichuan at the top of most of its semi-annual reports.
This may be because CCAF’s dataset started in September 2019, at the start of Sichuan’s dry season, when hydroelectric plants were running at lower capacities and not producing as much energy. Blandin said the map could at least confirm that some Chinese miners may actually migrate from Sichuan to Xinjiang after the rainy season.
Now that the rainy season has begun, the disparity between the data from CCAF and CoinShares could close.
EDIT (May 13 09:25 UTC): An earlier version of this article stated that the data came from the APIs, and the development of the mining map took about a year. This has since been corrected.
