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China’s broad Bitcoin mining expulsion this year, coupled with its most-serious crypto ban to date,  is a clear inflection point in the nascent-yet-growing Bitcoin space. Almost overnight, the criticism that “China controls Bitcoin” became moot, as the historical epicenter of Bitcoin mining went dark and its professionals packed up their machines to move elsewhere. 

In the subsequent fallout, North America—particularly, the United States—emerged as the dominant mining hub around the world. Furthermore, mining machine preorders and hashrate projects for 2022 indicate that this won’t change anytime soon. 

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Some models show that the United States alone has already captured 35% of the network’s hashrate. Though this data from Cambridge’s Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index is imperfect; it leans on IP address data, which can be unreliable due to VPNs and other IP-scrambling technologies, and it is incomplete as it only draws from four Bitcoin mining pools, it’s likely not far off the mark. At Luxor Technologies, we estimate that the United States currently runs 40% of the network hashrate.

The ban kickstarted the largest restructuring of “hashrate” since Bitcoin’s inception (hashrate is the industry term for how much computing power is employed at a given time to secure the Bitcoin network). With more than half of Bitcoin’s hashrate displaced from China, the second half of 2021 has been a lucrative time for plugged-in miners.

None more so than North America’s top, publicly traded Bitcoin mining companies. The top six by market capitalization, for example, mined 79% more bitcoin in Q3 than they did in Q2 and 155% more than they mined in Q1. With competition clipped by China’s mining ban, they are producing more blocks than they otherwise would have if Chinese miners, which used to represent anywhere from 50-60% of the network, remained online. These miners also turned on new machines over Q3, expanding their hashrate.

And there’s more coming. Thanks to a plethora