Written by: Liu Honglin
Many people's impression of cryptocurrency "mining" is still stuck in the Bitcoin era of "following the water and grass" - using wind power in the northwest during winter and hydropower in the southwest during summer. Thousands of machines were stuffed into iron houses in the desert, built beside rivers in Sichuan, roaring day and night, consuming electricity like a mountain torrent.
But the reality is that now the industry is more characterized by a "lightweight mining" approach: not relying on hydropower, not going deep into the mountains, but quietly running a few devices in city office buildings. There are no fan roars, no burnt circuit board smells, just silently "calculating" and quietly producing Tokens.
Due to work reasons, Lawyer Honglin often interacts with Web3 project parties, developers, and investors in Shanghai and Shenzhen. Many familiar friends would take me to their offices and point to a pile of hardware machines, introducing, "This is our cryptocurrency mining site."
Outside the room are China's most centralized financial centers, bustling with traffic. Inside the room, machines are running silently, without detectable sound or heat changes, supporting decentralized finance and dreams.
This "lightweight mining" approach is actually an industry evolution under regulatory high pressure in recent years. On one hand, large-scale deployment is no longer sustainable due to policy risks; on the other hand, as many new projects abandon Bitcoin's PoW route and shift to lower-power PoS, distributed storage, and edge computing mechanisms, mining's physical form has become "invisible".
From a compliance perspective, this is a typical "unclear" state - the equipment is compliant, the network is compliant, and the running nodes are not illegal, but its revenue method and incentive logic still belong to the cryptocurrency domain. You can't say it's not mining, but you also can't definitively call it illegal. This creates a subtle survival space for the industry: continuing to run in a gray area, not too big, not too noisy, but indeed still alive.
[The rest of the translation follows the same professional and accurate approach, maintaining the original text's tone and meaning while translating into clear, fluent English.]In this era of increasingly intense computing power competition on a global scale, if we cannot establish a mining and computing power integration mechanism that both respects underlying technical paths and can be incorporated into regulatory oversight, we will likely be absent from the next wave of global computing infrastructure competition.
Rather than blocking, it is better to clearly understand its true nature; instead of hiding it, it is better to incorporate it into an open rule system. This can at least allow projects that could have operated in the open to have fewer concerns and less motivation for gray-area operations.
This is precisely a new issue that truly needs discussion.
