China’s mining community is confused, on edge, and preparing for the worst after a weekend of chilling regulatory news from the Asian superpower. Some miners have scaled back their China-based operations, other miners abruptly migrated their machines out of the country, and the entire cryptocurrency market has been generally spooked for the last several days. 
 

Despite the undesirable short-term market effect, the potential for a sudden change in the geographic dispersion of Bitcoin mining can, in the long term, radically alter the industry for the better.

Seasoned bitcoin investors understand that China-related Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) is commonplace, and almost every bull market cycle includes a novel twist of some age-old China FUD. Here’s an overview of the history of unfavorable bitcoin news from China over the years—there’s a lot of it.

China’s Financial Stability and Development Committee held a meeting Friday where, during a wide-ranging discussion on general financial planning and reform, Vice Premier Liu He called for a “crackdown on Bitcoin mining and trading behavior,” according to a translation of a report on the meeting. The motivation for this policy seems to come from a desire to prevent financial risk.
 

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Ethereum monthly mining revenue is set to outpace Bitcoin for the first time during the current bull cycle, highlighting both ether’s exceptional price gains and on-chain markets’ strong demand for block space even during a drawdown in token prices.

Ethereum miners raked in $2.19 billion in total revenue during the first three weeks of May, with 48% coming from transactions fees alone, according to Coin Metrics data. Bitcoin miners took in $1.43 billion over the same period.

Ethereum mining revenue has surpassed Bitcoin mining revenue a few times before (e.g., during the 2017 bull cycle). But this "flippening" is always short lived.

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In March, Foundry’s bitcoin mining pool opened for business. A few months after that, Foundry’s growth has been remarkable. Since late 2020, Foundry’s pool had been mining in a beta phase. But since the pool started accepting miners, it rocketed into the top 10 rankings of pools globally with approximately 5% of the network’s total hashrate.
 

Here’s a quick overview of Foundry’s growth during the past several months.

Since its inception, Foundry’s pool has set new records every month for the total number of blocks mined. With more blocks come more block rewards, and Foundry has certainly increased the frequency of its block reward claiming.

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Cryptocurrency mining stocks exploded in price and popularity in late 2020 as shareholders of public bitcoin and ether mining companies rode the tailwinds of bitcoin’s parabolic rally. Mining stock investors didn’t need a lot of money to make a lot of money from these investments.
 

In fact, dumping each stimulus check sent from the US Treasury into mining stocks over the past year would have returned a very handsome profit. Here’s some data.

To date, Americans have received three rounds of stimulus checks for a total of $3,200. Here’s how investments of that amount in Riot, Bitfarms, Canaan, Hut 8, Hive, or Marathon would look over the past year.

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