Inner Mongolia shutters cryptocurrency mining operations

Responding to the central government's call to accelerate high-quality development and promote the construction of ecological civilization, North China's Inner Mongolia autonomous region shut down existing cryptocurrency mining projects by April 2021 and will not approve any new ones.

The policy change was announced in the "Notice on Several Safeguard Measures for Ensuring Completion of Energy Consumption Dual Control Targets in the 14th Five-Year Plan Period (2021-25)," which was jointly issued on March 9, 2021 by Inner Mongolia's development and reform commission, department of industry and information technology and energy bureau.

The cryptocurrency mining industry has nothing to do with the real economy. It only solves problems by inputting computing power with special computing equipment.

Based on the latest algorithm statistics of the University of Cambridge on bitcoin's electricity consumption, cryptocurrency mining consumes approximately 121.38 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity each year for the whole world, exceeding the power generation capacity of more than 160 countries around the world, according to a report from China Youth Daily.

Ordos city in Inner Mongolia, a large-scale energy base in China, was once home to Bitmain, China's largest bitcoin-mining company.

Bitmain had a large "mining pool" in Ordos that accounted for about 4 percent of the entire network's computing power.

At peak times, 25,000 mining machines worked 24 hours a day, racking up hundreds of millions of yuan in electricity fees.

To meet the control targets for energy consumption, as early as 2019, the relevant departments in Inner Mongolia launched the "Notice on Inspection and Reorganization of Cryptocurrency Mining Enterprises" and issued work-suspension notices to 21 companies.

During the 14th Five-Year Plan period (2021-25), the target of reducing energy consumption per unit of GDP in Inner Mongolia is 14 percent to 15 percent, with an average annual decrease of about 3 percent.