Quick Mining Update
Iranian officials announced that police have confiscated 9,404 illegal cryptocurrency mining devices/rigs in Tehran since March 2021. In the past few years, many operations taking advantage of subsidized electricity were found throughout the country.
In August 2021, 3.11% of Bitcoins mining hashrate took place in Iran. In January 2022, this number went down to 0.12%
It is not specified what types of mining devices were confiscated. The largest Bitcoin miner manufacturer, Bitmain, produces the industry leading Antminer Bitcoin ASIC miners.
Antminer’s current top of the line unit is the Antminer S19 Pro which costs $4,400 per device. The ASIC (Application-specific integrated circuit) miner is capable of mining Bitcoin at 110 TH/s (Terra Hash per second) and uses 3250 Watts of power.
While Bitmain mainly focuses on Bitcoin miners, they released the Antminer E3 in 2019, an Ethereum mining rig. Then in July 2022, they announced the Antminer E9, which is currently sold out and not shipping until October 2022. This could possibly be post-merge, which would indicate that many either purchased the device to mine Ethereum Classic (ETC) or weren’t expecting the shipping to take this long.
The total number of active #Bitcoin nodes in August 2021 was 12,296 and now we’re at 14,274. Finland went up two spots and Singapore locked China out of the top ten counties hosting Bitcoin nodes. Source:bitnodes https://t.co/1LiIQ1Mi3Z pic.twitter.com/K09MCFoXAF
— FAL.eth (@CryptoFal) August 22, 2022
Many mining companies have pulled operations from Russia due to the war. Japan SBI Holdings suspended their operations in Siberia in February as the war started. Compass Mining closed its operation in Siberia as well, with an offer of $30 million liquidation. Many Chinese miners moved operations to Russia following China’s crypto and mining crackdowns in 2020.
