Mining has become a loss-making business, and many governments have greatly increased the electricity price of virtual currency mining.

　　Since September 2021, China’s regulatory policy on virtual currency has been upgraded in an all-round way, and various provinces, cities and autonomous regions have successively carried out relevant special rectification actions. On January 26th, the Inner Mongolia Development and Reform Commission issued a notice, deciding to implement the differential electricity price for the virtual currency "mining" project and the "eliminated" enterprise electricity price, with the price increase standard of 1 yuan per kWh (per kWh).

　　On December 3, 2021, Hainan Provincial Development and Reform Commission took the lead in issuing a notice, deciding to classify virtual currency "mining" activities as obsolete industries, and implement differential electricity prices, with the price increase standard of 0.8 yuan per kWh (kWh).

　　A bitcoin investor told The Paper that the policy of differential electricity price is not to allow bitcoin mining, and the policy of cracking down on bitcoin mining is still going on.

　　"The main cost of digging bitcoin is electricity. When bitcoin mining was not cracked down before, the approximate cost of large mines was more than 30 cents for thermal power in winter and cheaper for hydropower in summer. And if the electricity bill increases by 0.8-1 yuan, then digging bitcoin is bound to be a serious loss. " The investor said.

　　Sun Yulin, a senior researcher at Ou Ke Cloud Chain Research Institute, also told The Paper that the implementation of differential electricity prices in Inner Mongolia and Hainan will obviously increase the cost of bitcoin mining. According to the master data on the Okeyun chain, according to the current differential electricity price, the annual electricity fee for each bitcoin mining machine is about 10,000 yuan, and the mining time is about 2 years. After the differential electricity price is implemented, the return time is far away and the electricity cost will increase by about 4 times. Currency price of mainstream mining institutions (data source: f2pool)

　　Take the ant miner S19 as an example, its rated computing power is 95TH/s and its power consumption is 3250w. On January 22nd, based on the electricity fee of 0.1 USD/kWh (i.e. about 0.6 yuan/kWh), f2pool calculated that the pure electricity fee cost (i.e. the shutdown price calculated by f2pool) of this type of mining machine for "mining" a bitcoin was about 17,590 USD. If the electricity fee is increased in 1 yuan, it will be about 2.7 times of the original price, and the pure electricity cost for each bitcoin dug by Ant Mining Machine S19 will also be increased to about 46,907 dollars. At present, the price of Bitcoin is about 35,000-36,000 US dollars, which is far lower than the pure electricity cost of Bitcoin "mining".

　　"Now Bitcoin ‘ Mining ’ If you can make a profit, you can either build a mine overseas, or put a few mining machines at home to steal and make money. " The above investors said.