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Outside a warehouse in upstate New York, Sam Tabar stands transfixed, gazing at a pile of coal as a Caterpillar excavator scoops chunks up for removal. His company, Bit Digital, is one of the world's largest cryptocurrency mining firms, and it has taken over this former coal plant for its own operations.
“It’s come full circle now,” he marvels. “We have these places that were devastated by China's takeover of manufacturing,” referring to American Rust Belt deindustrialization over the past few decades. But now, “the future is coming back to Buffalo, thanks to China.”
China once dominated the Bitcoin mining market, the computing process by which new Bitcoin enters circulation. The country once accounted for more than 80 percent of the world’s Bitcoin mining. But in the way authoritarian states can, Beijing decided to ban all foreign cryptocurrencies last year in part to bolster its own centrally-controlled digital yuan. As miners scrambled to move their valuable hardware out, they made bets on which countries were safest to install their machines. By geographic proximity and the promise of cheap energy, some transferred their assets to Russia and Kazakhstan. Others opted for higher transport fees and sent their equipment to the United States. Given Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Kazakhstan’s own violent political unrest this January, the choice has brought to sharp focus the mining risks in closed societies versus open societies.
Bit Digital had 30,000 ASICs—the machines used for mining—in China. Tabar, the company’s Chief Strategy Officer, and the rest of the team spent months shipping units, each worth thousands of dollars, out by plane, train, and boat. Choosing the United States made sense to Tabar.
How Bitcoin Mines Were Airlifted From China to the US
After China banned Bitcoin, an exodus of mining computers made their way all over the globe.
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