China doubles down on bitcoin and ether mining

The two largest mining pools, F2Pool and Sparkpool, are forced to take drastic measures due to bans by the Chinese government.

ASIC miner manufacturers and pools turned out to be the last major enterprises in China to be involved in the cryptocurrency industry. And the complete ban on transactions with cryptocurrencies for business dealt them the last serious blow. The largest Bitcoin mining pool, F2Pool, denied service to miners from China. Thus founded in May 2013 by F2Pool
fulfills the requirement of the Chinese regulators.

And Sparkpool – the second largest Ethereum mining pool – is forced to go even further and completely cease operations. Sparkpool, based in China, also officially suspended services to miners from mainland China on September 27. This turned out to be insufficient to protect itself from being harassed by Chinese regulators. After blocking users from China last Friday, the Sparkpool administration continued
disconnect miners and plans to suspend the operation of all registered users of the mining pool on September 30, both in China and abroad. On the official website, the pool administration has posted information for its clients, where it informs that the measures to block users are aimed primarily at ensuring the security of users’ cryptoassets in accordance with the requirements of the PRC legislation.

“More detailed information about the completion of the pool will be sent to users in e-mail and posted on the resource.”

SparkPool has been operating in China since the beginning of 2018 and has been the second largest Ethereum mining pool after Ethermine in terms of hashrate. It is possible that Ethermine will also have to block Chinese users. This will seriously harm the pool itself, but not the Ethereum network, since it is easy for miners to switch to other pools.