China’s 2021 Bitcoin mining ban didn’t kill the industry - it moved it. The crackdown forced hardware distributors to abandon their domestic market overnight and rebuild their entire customer base abroad.
Summer Meng, CEO of distributor Bitmars, told the Bitcoin Takeover Podcast that the ban was a direct catalyst. Before 2021, selling within China was sufficient. Afterward, distributors pivoted almost entirely to North America, which is now the primary destination for new ASIC miners.
Summer Meng, Bitcoin Takeover Podcast:
- That was officially where we started to do our business because of the banning.
- We started to sell overseas because by that time the domestic market could no longer fulfill the whole business.
The geographic shift revealed a stark cultural divide. Meng noted that even Chinese mining employees overwhelmingly refused to be paid in Bitcoin, preferring the Yuan. State-run media’s relentless framing of Bitcoin as a scam vehicle created a workforce that built the network’s security but wanted no exposure to its asset.
This pivot cemented the power of secondary distributors. Manufacturers like Bitmain often list new hardware as sold out publicly, while distributors secure priority allocations. For most miners, these gatekeepers like Bitmars are the only practical route to the latest generation of machines.
The model insulates manufacturers from the operational risk of dealing with thousands of buyers and underscores the new mining geography. Hardware now follows cheap power, flowing through North American distributors to be deployed in energy-rich regions globally, a supply chain entirely rebuilt in three years.
