The Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance (CCAF), an academic research centre which is affiliated with the University of Cambridge, has developed a new global Bitcoin mining tracker. The tool is purported to reveal and compare cryptocurrency mining activities in different countries.
CCAF’s Bitcoin mining tracker
The monitoring tool, which is known as Bitcoin Mining Map, is designed to show the share of global hashrate of countries on a monthly basis, according to the report. It will also offer more thorough detail to compare the many provinces in China, which is considered the hub for digital currency mining.
The data so far from the Bitcoin mining tracker revealed that the people’s republic of China has the most significant global hashrate at 65 percent in total. While still leading the mining pace, China’s hashrate had reportedly dropped around 10 percent as of September. Russia and the United States are back at 7 percent.
The data provided on the new Bitcoin mining tracker is curated from three of the top mining pools, namely Poolin, BTC.com, as well as ViaBTC, at present. While this could alter the actual activity in Europe and North America, CCAF said it would update on new pools to ensure a comprehensive report.
A challenge in mining data
CCAF’s crypto and blockchain lead, Apolline Blandin said the data provided on monitoring tools would help to verify market intuitions and ensure transparency. It will also facilitate participants to conduct their operations better.
One of the issues in determining exact locations in terms of hashrate concentration is the fact that some miners make use of VPNs, which hides out their actual IP addresses. According to CCAF, this is rampant in the province of Zhejiang. The announcement reads:
To mitigate this effect, we have divided the hashrate of Zhejiang province proportionally among other Chinese provinces listed in the pool’s dataset,
