As China’s crackdown on cryptocurrencies broadens to bitcoin miners, some of the industry’s biggest players are already shifting operations overseas. Bitmain, which runs China’s two largest bitcoin-mining collectives, is setting up regional headquarters in Singapore and has mining operations in the US and Canada, said Wu Jihan, the company’s cofounder. BTC.Top, the third-biggest mining pool, is opening a facility in Canada and ViaBTC, ranked number four, has operations in Iceland and the US, their founders said. Chinese policy makers, who banned initial coin offerings in 2017 and called on local exchanges to halt virtual currency trading, outlined new proposals this week to discourage bitcoin mining, a computing process that makes transactions with the cryptocurrency possible. Officials plan to limit the industry’s power use and have asked local authorities to guide miners towards an "orderly" exit from the business, according to people familiar with the matter. While the moves are ...
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