At present, a number of provinces in China, especially the bitcoin mine concentrated in Sichuan, are already under investigation and the inventory work is led by the leading working group of the Internet financial risk special rectification office.A Bitcoin mine owner in Sichuan Province said in Economic Observer Newspaper, Some mines in the area have entered a shutdown condition and are waiting for the government's next regulatory policy.
This policy is different in all parts of the pace of promotion.Shandong, Jiangsu Province, two cities in the local financial office official told Economic Observer Network, at present, the two did not receive the relevant notice.One local financial office said The clean-up is mainly aimed at the areas where some mines in Central and Western China are concentrated.
An insider told the Economic Observer that regulation of the Bitcoin pool has come into the custody of the regulator as early as September when the ICO policy landed, and at the same time, the source also said regulators are currently adopting the Bitcoin The regulatory strategy of 'tight within the tight loose' for the supervision of the mine is only part of the entire regulatory chain.
Economic Observer also learned from three independent sources, at present, including Hunan, Heilongjiang, Hebei, Guangdong and other provinces have appeared on the virtual currency investment, virtual currency mining machine investment bank account freeze, which has been The total amount of known freeze more than 600 million yuan.
At present, 70% of the global bitcoin pools are concentrated in China, and the tightening of regulatory policies for bitcoin mines is expected to bring tremendous impact on the Bitcoin mining market. On January 12, ViaBTC, a large bitcoin pool, issued a notice stating that 'bitcoin mines that have long-term partnerships with ViaBTC even face a crisis of closure due to policy reasons, very tight domestic mine resources and a sudden drop in cloud pool maintenance costs at the mine Surge.Therefore, a mining machine management fee will be temporarily adjusted from 6% to 50%.
A bitcoin mine owner told Economic Observer that the policy is still in the process of being implemented and the impact is expected to be gradually enlarged in the future. Therefore, some large-scale mines have begun to be deployed overseas, but small and medium- "The cost of going out to sea is not an option for us, either at the funding level or at the resource level," the mine owner told Economic Observer.
Mine ushered in regulatory tide
In early 2018, a document led by the leading group for the special rectification work of Internet financial risks (hereinafter referred to as 'mutual gold rectification office') was issued to financial offices in various places in succession. In this document, it is mentioned that we should actively guide the jurisdiction Enterprises withdraw from the 'mining' business and require statistics from all localities involved in the 'mining' business, including the basic conditions of their businesses, their revenue and their preferential treatment. Since then, some provinces have begun to regulate bitcoin mines Increasingly more stringent.
Bitcoin mining is actually a 'package' of bitcoin transactions. A certain amount of bitcoin transactions need to be packaged into a block that, when confirmed, links to the previous block to form a so-called 'Blockchain.' In this process, the 'mine owner' responsible for packaging can get the bitcoin rewards generated by the system, which is also the 'distribution' of Bitcoin.
Due to the existence of rewards, there will be competition for 'bail-outs.' Competition uses a proof-of-workload mechanism, where the decisive factor is the computing power, and as bitcoin mining equipment tends to be standardized, As more channels are mined and mined thousands of large mines, which require large amounts of electricity, they are mostly deployed in power-rich regions such as Sichuan, Inner Mongolia and Yunnan in China.
A bitcoin mine owner told Economic Observer that since the bitcoin price started to climb in 2017, the mine has become a high-margin industry. A mine machine can generate a net profit of over 200 yuan a day, so bitcoin mines The number of games began to increase.
Some miners have already felt 'panic' during the gradual progress of their regulatory policies. A bitcoin mine owner in Sichuan told Economic Observer recently that the government departments have been in a position to understand the situation. In response to the inspection, some The mine owner has shut down his own mine.
Electricity 'original sin'
As the difficulty of bitcoin 'mining' increases with the increase in overall network computing effort, this positive correlation can lead to sustained and tremendous amounts of power in various mines.
In fact, the cost of electricity has also become a major cost for bitcoin mines, which, according to industry site Digiconomist, represent 0.17% of the world's electricity consumption.
The huge power consumption has become one of the reasons for regulatory attention. In the documents handed down by the Financial Bankers all over the world, it is mentioned that some so-called mining enterprises that produce 'virtual currency' currently exist, while consuming a large amount of resources and contributing to The 'virtual currency' speculation style of the wind.
The miners told Economic Observer that as mining takes a lot of electricity, getting cheaper electricity becomes central to the operation of bitcoin mines, and because of this, some mines are laid out in areas with abundant power resources, There are even mines rely on the establishment of hydropower stations or in the vicinity of thermal power plants.
'Some mines get the preferential terms offered by local governments when they move in, which is equivalent to attracting investments. They tend to build in the name of big data centers and then enjoy some preferential policies on electricity' Economic Observer said.
According to the Economic Observer newspaper's earlier interview, some mines use some non-normal channels of 'cheap electricity' to save costs - after the electricity is generated, they will be uniformly transported to the national grid and distributed by the national grid. However, The mine will bypass the national grid and directly negotiate with some hydropower plants and thermal power plants to use electricity at a very low price.
'For example, some mines have 10,000 mines, of which 5,000 with the regular price of the national grid, industrial electricity is about 1 yuan; the other 5,000 to use some of the agreement, the price may be only about 3 hair, the entire cost will be Lower. "Earlier, a mine owner on the Economic Observer said.
These agreements have given some power plants the option of giving priority to bitcoin mines, exposing some residents to lack of electricity after winter.
'Tight within tight loose' chain of custody
Entered in 2018, a number of regulatory news for the bitcoin market continue to spread, its authenticity is also different, these rumors involving Bitcoin OTC, bitcoin mines and other fields.
An insider told the Economic Observer that the regulators now adopt a 'tight inside and loose' strategy for bitcoin regulation, although a surge in the new round of price rises after the regulatory polices came to an end in September 2017 Regulators have never stopped, but for this market, regulators have been watching and vigilant.
While monitoring bitcoin mines, the Economic Observer newspaper also learned from many sources that since the beginning of 2018, bitcoin over-the-counter transactions have emerged in many provinces including Heilongjiang, Hunan, Hebei and Guangdong. Bitcoin mining machines Trading bank accounts are frozen When a person who has just entered the field of Bitcoin investment buys bitcoin on the first day, his account is frozen the next day.
In early December 2017, the National Internet Financial Security Committee of Experts issued a bitcoin over-the-counter monitoring report. The report mentioned that since October, the Bitcoin OTC platform has been accelerated. Some of these platforms have passed Open up the virtual transfer channel between C2C over-the-counter transactions and the transaction funds accounts in the currency market, and some of these platforms have in some ways realized the disguised exchange transactions between RMB and Bitcoin.'According to September 2017, The Notice on Preventing the Financing Risk of Coin Issuance promulgated by the Central Bank and other departments made it clear that 'any so-called token financing trading platform shall not engage in the exchange business between the legal currency and tokens and the' virtual currency '.
The insider told Economic Observer that the regulation of bitcoin mines is also part of bitcoin regulation.
Huang Zhen, director of the institute of financial law at the Central University of Finance and Economics, told Economic Observer that the current monitoring and control measures on virtual currency use more ways of blocking. However, in view of the characteristics of the virtual currency itself, Long-term fear has a good effect, so Huang believes that the next step should be to 'divert' approach, such as the establishment of China's own digital currency system.
In July 2017, the central bank set up the "Institute of Digital Monetary Resources" to engage in the technology and application of digital currency. Yao, director of the institute, once referred to the concept of digital currency on multiple occasions, dividing the digital currency into 'Digital private currency' and 'legal digital currency', and mentioned that 'the digitization of money is actually a very dynamic and evolving thing. Some of the properties may be clearly visible to us and some of the properties It may not be completely clear now, but it needs to be fully expanded. This is my problem.