[throwaway-8c93]

There are several reasons it's mostly a China-operation. Interestingly, it's a textbook example of deficiencies being the competitive advantage.

#1 - China's electricity grid is not very efficient at distributing, which leads to some areas with constant surpluses, directly translating into extremely low electricity prices in those areas

#2 - almost all computer hardware is manufactured in East Asia. Chinese miners don't buy their hardware on the open market, they snatch underhanded special deals with the manufacturers who're then deeply sorry about their "unexpected manufacturing shortfalls"

#3 - Crypto is essentially banned in China for private citizens. Chinese Communist Party is actually quite happy about the mining though - when you zoom out a bit, it's just a money pipe from the rest of the world (mainly US) to China. It also funds bootstrapping of their silicon industry

#4 - crypto in general benefits from weak rule of law. Try running a crypto mining operation in France - the tax collectors will be knocking on your door after the first mined block. Corruption and nepotism is absolutely endemic in China - "sharing" a bit of the mining profits with the local officials has a high chance of skirting the rest of the tax burden

[ArtTimeInvestor]

These 4 points would apply to any type of high latency / low security computation though.

Is Bitcoin mining the only type of such computation for which there is a large demand?