Too bad it wasn't a fad.
As the otherwise terrible person but heavy crypto believer recently pointed out, it may be a very bad fad for western liberal democracy. That none of the PoW crypto is decentralized anymore is another fad that's passed.
Here's somethings to consider:
Chinese citizens are prohibited from buying/selling/having an account on an exchange, but are permitted still to “own” crypto:
https://www.mondaq.com/china/fin-tech/944330/regulation-of-cryptocurrency-in-china
China mines/block validates 66% or more of BTC and as much or more for many other coins:
Percentage of Hashes (mining/block creation metric) :
https://cbeci.org/mining_maphttps://www.buybitcoinworldwide.com/mining/hardware/
“Yet, the idea of geographical centralization is a concern, albeit one that has been exaggerated by those who want to paint bitcoin and ethereum in a certain light. It is factually correct to say that Chinese bitcoin mining pools control a large amount of the hash rate that powers bitcoin, for example. A study in 2019 estimated that there was about 65% of the hash rate within China itself. This was largely due to cheap hydroelectricity (especially in areas such as Sichuan), and close connections between hardware manufacturers based in China and mining pools/miners with the best claim to established relationships.”
Rig Manufacturers:
NOTE: AMD and Bitfury have a tiny fraction of the market. All ICs in the Chinese rigs are Chinese designed and manufactured.
Chinese - ASICminer Co.
Chinese - Baikal Miner
Chinese - BitMain Technologies Holding Co.
Chinese - Canaan Inc.
Chinese - Cynosure Technologies Co. Ltd.
Chinese - Halong Mining
Chinese - INNOSILICON Technology Ltd.
Chinese - Shenzhen MicroBT Electronics Technology Co. Ltd.
Chinese - EBANG
Dutch (sort of) - Bitfury Group Ltd.
American - Advanced Micro Devices Inc.
Market Share:
Rig ICs:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitmain
By 2018 it had become the world's largest designer of application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) chips for bitcoin mining
https://investor.canaan-creative.com/corporate/company-profile
Canaan’s chief executive, Nangeng Zhang, founded the company in 2013. Together with his team, he invented and delivered one of the first cryptocurrency mining machines incorporating application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) technology. The company initially dedicated its research and development efforts to ASIC applications for Bitcoin mining and rapidly built up its know-how of ASIC design.
ETC.
bloXroute is a Blockchain Distribution Network (BDN) that utilizes a global network of servers optimized for network performance. In other words, bloXroute allows the network to communicate fast.
Nodes access this network through open source Gateways and anyone can access it through the bloXroute public-API.
