“After waiting for a long time for bitcoin halving, my store couldn’t open. Colleagues all went to WeChat moments to sell breathing masks and disinfectants for the ordinary expense.” In eyes of Miss Hu, a mining equipment vendor in Huaqiang North – China’s No.1 electronics street and world’s largest distribution center of mining rigs, this February gets her distressed recently.

Recently, stimulated by multiple factors such as the spread of the coronavirus and the halving, bitcoin once again broke the $10000 in the global trading market. By rights, the crypto mining machine sales should be booming, but now influenced by the coronavirus controls of the state, the mining equipment sector in Huaqiang North has to stop the business.

“Originally scheduled for opening on February 10, but later it was postponed to February 18. And I don’t know if there will be any changes.” The mining equipment vendor Miss Hu said that even if the market is open now, we can only do business with regular customers as logistics and delivery will be delayed, and new customers dare not come to the store to inquire as they are afraid of being infected.

Huaqiang North is not the only one influenced by the coronavirus outbreak as practitioners in the whole crypto mining industry chain, from mining machine manufacturers and dealers to mines in China can only sigh amid the bitcoin soaring price before halving.

For some miners, influenced by the postponed logistics, though they can’t buy a real miner, they can also ‘cut the computing power’. ” Many dealers in Huaqiang North have their own mining farms as they can sell part of their computing power to customers. In short, they rent other people’s mining machines to mine, and return the machines to the mining farms when it is due, and they don’t need to move the machines.”

Last week, Jiang Zhuo’er, founder of mining pool LTC.Top, posted a weibo (Tweet equivalent in China), complaining that one of his mining farms in remote rural areas in Xinjiang had been forced to shut down by local police as quarantine controls became stricter these days.

At present, the main bitcoin mining farms in China are located in provinces like Sichuan, Yunnan, Inner Mongolia, and Xinjiang, once the epidemic situation gets more serious in Sichuan, the local mining farms will inevitably suffer losses.

Recently, the head of a crypto mining farm in the Sichuan region revealed that though most of the crypto mining farms are not shut down, the owners cannot build or expand the mining farms. This is obviously not good news for the upstream miner makers.

On the other hand, impacted by the coronavirus controls, at present, major Chinese mining machine manufacturers like Bitmain, Canaan, Whatsminer have announced to postpone the production, delivery, and after-sales of crypto mining machines.

Xiaojun Fan, Bitmain’s sales director, recently made it clear to the media that the delivery of major mining machine manufacturers may be delayed as now most of the staffs are unable to return to work on time, which will delay the delivery of chips, supply chains and materials due to the impact of the coronavirus controls. Xinxi Wang, the co-founder of Litecoin foundation, also pointed out that the epidemic will have a greater impact on the cash flow of mining machine manufacturers, hoping that they can have enough cash to keep the company running normally.

Now it is only about three months before bitcoin halving. If the coronavirus can be controlled asap, a large number of miners will quickly iterate over the old machines or expand the mining farms, and the hashrate will also experience a rapid surge. However, due to the contraction of the new machine capacity of major miner makers, miners who cannot get new machines will be under greater pressure. If the mining profits decline, these miners are likely to shut down mining equipment to reduce losses.

Surely after the bitcoin halving, most of the miners will be more sensitive to the fluctuation of the price as the difficulty of mining increases. At that time, once the price dumps, the shutdown price will be triggered.