They can be found all over the world, including India. But in India, there is a heavy price that thousands of miners working illegally in mica mines in the country are paying. Poor and dangerous working conditions Widow Basanti Mosamat, 40, lives in Jharkhand who specializes in collecting and selling scrap mica for a living. This is her family’s only source of income. Once a week, Mosamat, her father-in-law and her five children hike 10 kilometers into the woods near the village to set up camp and spend a few days sifting for minerals. Picking up mica from dawn to dusk without any protective gear left her hands scratched and bruised. Her eldest daughter has picked up mica since she was 5. The more hands on the job, the more likely the family will have food on the table. “One mica picker is not enough. My father passed away, so I had to help my mother,” she said. 1 kg of shredded mica sells for 7 rupees ($0.10). On a lucky day, the Mosamat family hopes to earn 150 rupees ($2.06). Mica miners. Photo: CNA They are part of India’s 100 million indigenous people known as the Adivasis, who live on the fringes of society with limited government support for health, education, job security and food. “There’s nothing here, a life of hunger and fullness makes it impossible for us to look forward to the future,” Birhor said. Poverty has led some miners to turn to abandoned caves and mines, where there is more mica. However, they do not have lights or protective equipment, only exploiting based on experience. “People can slip and fall somewhere or get kicked in the head. Mining is very difficult. We always have to be vigilant, the mine is likely to collapse at any time. Sometimes one mistake can kill them all,” said Mukesh Bhulla, who started picking up mica as a scared child. In January, there were at least three reports of mine collapses in Koderma and Jharkhand. An estimated 10 to 20 people die each month due to the risks of mica mining. In fact, there are more accidents than are reported. However amateur miners have no choice but to take the risk. “If we didn’t work here, we would all die. There is no other option for the job. What are we going to do?”, shared Dimpi Devi, a mother of three. This makes people like Devi very vulnerable to exploitation, especially when they can’t afford living expenses. If they cannot borrow from mainstream banks, they have to look to usury lenders with interest rates up to 200%/year. “Some people told us they were only allowed to sell mica to their creditors at the price these merchants asked for,” said investigative journalist Peter Bengtsen. He has been monitoring the mica trade in Jharkhand for more than a decade. “Basically, the deal will last until they pay off their debts,” Bengtsen said. Forest management inspections are also common, and miners are sometimes required to pay bribes to keep working. Mosamat said: “The police don’t visit us often, but the rangers keep an eye on us. “There is a network of people manipulating mica mining and they are very powerful,” said Deepak Bara, a freelance journalist based in Jharkhand. Indian children participate in mica mining. Photo: CNA A systemic problem Controversy over mica mining began to surface in the mid-2000s, following investigations into the use of child labor in the industry. According to the International Labor Organization, India has more than 10 million children who are working even though they are not of working age. In particular, the plight of child miners in the mica industry has attracted international media attention. However, according to many journalists and politicians, children born into mica mining families have no choice but to continue the work of their parents. “They have to earn extra income for the family. The government does not have a policy to support children or if it does, it is not effective,” Bara said. In response to growing public concern, several global campaigns have been established. One of them is the Mica Initiative, which intends to eliminate child mining in Jharkhand next year. Members of the campaign include Chanel, L’Oréal and Sephora. Some other brands are also committed to more rigorous testing of the supply chain. However, they must also admit that managing mica sources is very difficult. In 2019, mica exports in India reached more than 37 million USD (according to World Bank data). With so many transactions, brands can’t track exactly where their mica comes from. Yue Jin Tay, business development manager of Circulor, a company that uses blockchain to verify the provenance of minerals in the supply chain, said technology could be part of the solution but more is needed to make it happen. Ethical trading became a common practice. And consumers need to accept that the company has to pay increasing costs to more rigorously examine the supply chain.

“Many large mining owners have contacted me to move their rigs to North America, Europe, Kazakhstan,” Edward Evenson, business development manager at mining firm Slush Pool, said on Twitter. Where does the owner of the Chinese coin farm move? According to Mr. Evenson, the large ASIC mining pools in Xinjiang are being moved to other regions in Central Asia. However, many new batches of miners from companies such as Bitmain, MicroBT are moving directly to North America. Bitcoin farm owners in China will have to find new locations to operate, after the country’s government announced a ban on mining. Photo: Bloomberg. This expert said that the coin farmers who contacted him to move out of China own a miner with a total power consumption of up to 400 MW. This is equivalent to the entire electricity consumption of all Bitcoin mining pools in Quebec, Canada. Meanwhile, Dovey Wan, founder of consulting firm Primitive Ventures, said that in addition to Pakistan and Kazakhstan, countries that are near and have policies to attract Chinese businesses, many companies can choose to move machines. dug into Africa because electricity here is very cheap. Michael Saylor, CEO of MicroStrategy, believes that major mining companies in China will gradually move to the US. “I think in the near future most of the mining capacity will be going to the US and some other parts of the world,” Saylor, a frequent crypto advocate, said in an interview with Cointelegraph. CNN . Many Chinese regions such as Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang, and Sichuan are home to large Bitcoin mining factories. Photo: Bloomberg. Before China strongly banned Bitcoin mining, mining in the country accounted for 65% of the global Bitcoin mining capacity. Immediately after the ban, BTC.TOP, which accounts for 2.5% of Bitcoin capacity, announced the cessation of operations in the Chinese territory. According to the Coin Telegraph In the past few years, the region of Quebec, Canada has also become an attractive area for coin ranchers because of cheap electricity and many hydroelectric plants. This is considered a green energy source, with less emissions than thermal power plants. “There are currently about 90 companies in this industry operating in Quebec,” said Jonathan Côté, representative of Hydro-Québec hydroelectric power company. Mr. Evenson assessed that the diversification of the location of coin farmers has taken place in the past, but China’s ban on mining will accelerate this process. China bans mining but still dominates the world coin market One of the most controversial topics of the past few years has been the dominance of mining pools in China over the rest of the world. Many cryptocurrency advocates fear this outperformance will make Bitcoin’s decentralization worthless. China’s ban on Bitcoin mining may create hope that mining capacity will be less concentrated in large Chinese companies. However, experts say that no matter where they move to operate, the mining camps still belong to the Chinese. “Whether registered and operated in another region such as the US, Kazakhstan or Africa, the truth is that the mining pools still belong to Chinese companies. This transition only makes centralized networks difficult. more monitoring,” said Mrs. Dovey Wan. Yusan Zheng, founder and director of fund management company Waterdrip Capital also believes that China’s ban on mining will make it difficult for small companies, and large companies to benefit. “To find new locations for mining camps, companies will have to spend a lot of money. Only large, experienced companies can go through this stage,” said Mr. Yusan Zheng during the meeting. chat of CoinDesk . According to many experts, even if China bans mining, the world’s largest coin farms still belong to the Chinese. Photo: Bloomberg. Centralization has always been a threat to Bitcoin in particular, and all cryptocurrencies operating on the blockchain in general. If all the newly created Bitcoins were in the control of a few large companies, the neutrality and accuracy of the blockchain would be at stake. Inner Mongolia, one of the regions with the most mining camps in China, has recently proposed multiple penalties for miners. According to the proposed bill, telecommunications, Internet, software parks, or even internet companies that mine or provide resources for mining could have their electricity cut off, withdrawn or even confiscated. license revocation. The bill also stipulates that violators will be blacklisted for their social credit scores, meaning they won’t be able to borrow money from banks or use public transportation. Previously, the Inner Mongolia government also announced a hotline for people to call and report cases of illegal mining. Coin Telegraph The ban on Bitcoin mining will bring many benefits to China. The country has both met its climate target and can boost circulation of the digital yuan as cryptocurrencies are banned from trading. Meanwhile, Chinese businesses operating coin farms abroad will still have to pay taxes.

Recently, an investment of over $ 200 million has been made to build a mine in the US. This trend is increasing rapidly in North America, according to CoinShares chief strategy officer Meltem Demirors. In March, the US state of Kentucky also passed two bills to reduce taxes for cryptocurrency miners, in order to attract more local workers. With capital released, the construction of a large-scale Bitcoin mining industry in North America has never been so explosive. What happened? China now accounts for 65% of the global Bitcoin mining size, compared with just 7.24% for the US. The exact number may not be the same according to reports from the US and China, but the fact is that the US is far behind on this front. China accounts for 65% of the total global Bitcoin mining capacity (source: Cambridge University) In the early days of cryptocurrencies, American miners were still wondering if their hashrate was paid when contributing to the mining pool. In many cases, miners are paid less than their efforts. Since Bitcoin uses proof of work (PoW), the hash rate becomes what determines what percentage of the miner’s effort is paid off. Proof-of-Work ̣ (PoW) is a consensus algorithm created in the blockchain network, used to validate transactions and produce new blocks in the chain. Meanwhile, hash rate is a measure of the algorithmic ability of a cryptocurrency miner like Bitcoin. Because bitcoin mining involves solving algorithms to confirm transactions, it requires powerful equipment to help find the required hash in the shortest amount of time. But China started to exploit very quickly thanks to cheap labor and electricity prices without having to worry too much about external problems. The country currently leads the world, accounting for about 30% of hydroelectricity and 50% of its coal-fired power generation capacity. The problem of the environment In North America, any act of harmful to the environment is put on the radar of the activists. When the virtual currency craze exploded, Bitcoin mining, which consumes electricity and emits greenhouse gases, quickly became the focus of criticism. Meanwhile, electricity consumption for Bitcoin mining in China will peak at 296.59 TWh by 2024, according to Nature Communications. This exceeds total energy consumption in 2016 by Italy and Saudi Arabia combined. In March, the Bank of America criticized the consumption of one Bitcoin at a price of $ 50,000 for carbon emissions equivalent to 270 tons, equivalent to the internal combustion engines of 60 cars. The PoW mechanism causes Bitcoin transactions to require miners to compete for an algorithm to validate the block on the chain. In return, they are rewarded with Bitcoins for completing difficult problems. So, machines like the ASIC are specifically designed to do this, and they consume tremendous amounts of power. This is actually a security enhancement of PoW, not a bug. If the answers called hashes are too easy to solve, the blockchain network is vulnerable to attack by hackers. However, using a lot of energy isn’t necessarily a bad thing. A company called Crusoe Energy has developed technology to “capture” gas in the central atmosphere at oil wells and use it to power on-site data centers. The company deployed projects in Colorado, Montana, Wyoming, and North Dakota and resulted in a 72% reduction in CO2 emissions compared to burning it. Bitcoin mining is essentially power consuming because it runs 24/7 and needs stable and constant energy sources. Another advantage of Bitcoin is that it uses energy in places far from residential, like mining mines located in remote areas in Xinjiang, China. The big problem today is that Bitcoin is still using fossil fuels and enrich these companies. Only 39% of total energy consumption comes from renewable sources such as wind, water, and solar, according to research from Cambridge University. But even if Bitcoin mining runs entirely on renewable energy, it will create increasing demand for ASICs and disrupt the global supply chain of semiconductors. The end result is a pile of electronic waste that no single green energy source can deal with. The problem could be under control if the industry’s focus was shifted from China to the US, where environmental activists play an active role in curbing energy consumption and carbon emissions. school. Security risks? Aside from the environment, another danger lies in Bitcoin’s consensus mechanism with more than half of the network hashes located in China. That makes it possible for China to control the protocol and reverse transactions. This is a disgrace to Americans when the Internet revolution was initiated in the country of chess, but in the age of cryptocurrencies, China is in control of the game. Cryptocurrency attacks, known as 51% attacks, target a weakness in PoW’s consensus mechanism when a group of people has more than 50% of their hash power. In such attacks, the attacker does not actually steal the virtual currency, but just spends twice the amount he has by executing two transactions simultaneously to two different wallets and defrauding the system. But any exchange with good liquidity can prevent such an attack by setting a withdrawal limit. In the future, the competition of semiconductor chip factories creating more 4.0 shovels is expected to help this industry have global coverage. The end of PoW? Will the PoW mechanism be out of date? After all, Ethereum is emerging with the second largest market cap, preparing to move to a Proof-of-Stake mechanism that significantly reduces energy consumption and speeds up transactions. This mechanism makes it possible for one person to mine or validate block transactions by depositing virtual money into the network. This deposit is locked and returned to its owner after a set period of time, to prevent fraud. Even so, PoW in the 12 years of its existence has demonstrated its ability to prevent any cyberattacks. Meanwhile, PoS still needs time to experiment. Ethereum’s PoS transition phase, which is known as ETH 2.0, was planned 2 years ago and is expected to begin rolling out next July. The new hub of Bitcoin? Neither the US nor China, other emerging countries could soon outperform both thanks to more renewable energy and cheaper operating costs like India. America is thriving, but the gold mines in China cannot disappear overnight unless there are special government regulations. Experts expect that China can drop to 40-50% of the total hash rate within the next three years, and then North America could account for 30%, 20% from Europe and the remaining 10%. scattered in other areas. The problem with the US is that the federal government does not interfere and needs its own policies in states to attract and retain blockchain companies, as is the case with the state of Zug in Switzerland, which is known as the Valley. virtual money of the world thanks to specific policies of the state government. A miner is cleaning the ASIC Several states like Kentucky, Texas, and US cities like Miami are slowly recognizing blockchain as the technology of the future, and experts expect North America to win 10% of the global hashrate next year. Even so, as Bitcoin continues to receive investment, environmental issues will continue to be a major hurdle preventing the explosion of mining pools in North America, said the Hashrate Index expert Ethan Vera. The power failure in Xinjiang on April 16 affected the mines there and indirectly caused Bitcoin to lose 21% of its value from the peak of $ 64,000, possibly the strongest warning to the United States. in the war of cryptocurrencies, the future of humanity. Phuong Nguyen (according to CoinTelegraph)