Quote from: antirack on January 04, 2016, 07:29:33 AM

Quote from: jtoomim on January 03, 2016, 03:56:04 AM

According to a Bitmain employee, China's bitcoin mining is about 70% hydro, 30% coal during the summer, and about 50% hydro, 50% coal during the winter. Most of the dams in China have seasonal flows and power generation capacity. This is dirtier than the average for bitcoin mining worldwide, which is probably above 80% renewable, with almost all of that hydro. My facility is about 95% hydro, for example.

I've seen mines in China which are 100% hydro (they are attached to hydropower plants, if there is too little water they shut down). Instead of World vs. China it makes sense looking at individual facilities in my opinion.

By no means a complete picture and mostly based on my own observations (I have seen quite a few mines in China):

Some of the largest mines in China now run on hydro. The rate of hydro-powered mines is steadily increasing too, because ease of access to them and because lower electricity rates can be negotiated with owners or operators. I have seen an increasing number of "micro mines" during the past 6-12 months (1 megawatt range, some even smaller) at very remote locations - the power plants there aren't that big, but on the other hand very little electricity is used locally since there is almost no industry. The power used for mining is basically the "left-over" from these turbines, would otherwise not be used as they are too remote. In general I noticed a larger fragmentation of hash-power in China. There are physically big facilities (big halls), but I have yet to see a 100MW or even 40MW facility. 20MW and smaller on the other hand I have seen.

Of course many miners run their gear in industrial places within city boundaries (also first tier cities) and pay published electricity rates - they don't actually have control where the electricity comes from. But I believe these will be more exceptional in the future, as naturally miners in China also need to compete with the cost of Bitcoin mining on a global scale (US, Canada, Georgia, Iceland, Sweden etc...). I believe many of these city miners may be driven out of business sooner or later, the block reward halving may play some role too but who knows.

I have no idea if Chinese use 10% or 90% hydro for bitcoin. Or anything inbetween. I do know China has really bad air quality issues. I do know politicians all over the world like to find scapegoats.

So what better then to tell your people that bitcoin is making the air bad. Follow my logic most people don't use BTC so if China bans btc claiming it is bad for the air, most Chinese people would say okay since most Chinese people don't use or own BTC.

This is why being on the leading edge of Green is important for BTC. BTW any country could make the claim that BTC is causing bad air and use it to ban BTC.