This is what it looks like when a $14M Bitcoin farm shuts down in rural China.

This photo was taken in May 2021, but the story behind it was published on July 29, 2021, and it still stands out as one of the most defining moments of China’s crypto mining crackdown.

That’s a Tibetan woman in Heishui County, Sichuan, carrying parts of a Bitcoin mining rig that had just been relocated from Xinjiang. At the time, Sichuan was one of the last holdouts for miners in China, mainly because of cheap, abundant hydropower during the rainy season. Some of us in the space saw Sichuan as a kind of “last refuge” before the inevitable.

One facility in that region was running 80,000 ASICs, earning ¥90 million (~$14M USD) over just six months. Then came June 19, when the Sichuan government issued the shutdown order for 26 mining projects. Hashrates plummeted, and the global map of Bitcoin mining changed overnight.

The thing that hits me about this image is how much it grounds the idea of Bitcoin in physical reality. Everyone outside crypto thinks it’s all in the cloud, numbers on a screen. But this is it: real hardware, rural logistics, people moving rigs by hand. Bitcoin is very real infrastructure, even if the product is digital.

This was the end of the China mining era. It forced a global reshuffle, rigs went to the U.S., Kazakhstan, even places like Paraguay and Canada. It decentralized mining more than any event in Bitcoin's history.

In Depth: The Fall of China’s Last Bitcoin Mining Haven