The post Why Washington now eyes BTC miners appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com. Homepage > News > Business > The shadow over Bitmain: Why Washington now eyes BTC miners For years, most BTC holders didn’t think twice about where their mining equipment came from. Bitmain—this massive Beijing-based manufacturer—just kept shipping Antminers to warehouses in Texas, Kazakhstan, Paraguay, wherever. As long as the rigs worked and the hash rate kept climbing, nobody really cared. That casual attitude died this month when the U.S. government launched a national-security investigation into Bitmain and its stranglehold on global mining hardware. They’re calling it Operation Red Sunset, which should tell you how seriously they’re taking this. Here’s what has Washington spooked: Bitmain controls approximately 80% of the world’s Bitcoin mining equipment. And basically every modern Antminer can be accessed remotely through firmware updates. Theoretically, one command pushed from their headquarters in China could throttle, redirect, or completely brick a huge chunk of the BTC network’s processing power. Intelligence officials worry that Beijing could exploit that access directly, or force Bitmain to do it during some future crisis—Taiwan keeps coming up in these conversations. Making things messier, one of Bitmain’s biggest recent customers is American Bitcoin, a mining operation backed by Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump. So yeah, that’s added some urgency to the whole thing. American Bitcoin ordered 16,000 high-end rigs earlier this year for a new facility somewhere in the Midwest. The irony isn’t subtle: a company connected to the incoming first family is now at the center of an investigation designed to reduce foreign control over critical U.S. infrastructure. From what I’m hearing, investigators are especially interested in whether those machines have hidden backdoors or telemetry channels that Beijing could flip on without anyone knowing. Bitmain claims that its remote-management tools are solely for customer support and monitoring efficiency. They insist that no government has… The post Why Washington now eyes BTC miners appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com. Homepage > News > Business > The shadow over Bitmain: Why Washington now eyes BTC miners For years, most BTC holders didn’t think twice about where their mining equipment came from. Bitmain—this massive Beijing-based manufacturer—just kept shipping Antminers to warehouses in Texas, Kazakhstan, Paraguay, wherever. As long as the rigs worked and the hash rate kept climbing, nobody really cared. That casual attitude died this month when the U.S. government launched a national-security investigation into Bitmain and its stranglehold on global mining hardware. They’re calling it Operation Red Sunset, which should tell you how seriously they’re taking this. Here’s what has Washington spooked: Bitmain controls approximately 80% of the world’s Bitcoin mining equipment. And basically every modern Antminer can be accessed remotely through firmware updates. Theoretically, one command pushed from their headquarters in China could throttle, redirect, or completely brick a huge chunk of the BTC network’s processing power. Intelligence officials worry that Beijing could exploit that access directly, or force Bitmain to do it during some future crisis—Taiwan keeps coming up in these conversations. Making things messier, one of Bitmain’s biggest recent customers is American Bitcoin, a mining operation backed by Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump. So yeah, that’s added some urgency to the whole thing. American Bitcoin ordered 16,000 high-end rigs earlier this year for a new facility somewhere in the Midwest. The irony isn’t subtle: a company connected to the incoming first family is now at the center of an investigation designed to reduce foreign control over critical U.S. infrastructure. From what I’m hearing, investigators are especially interested in whether those machines have hidden backdoors or telemetry channels that Beijing could flip on without anyone knowing. Bitmain claims that its remote-management tools are solely for customer support and monitoring efficiency. They insist that no government has…

Why Washington now eyes BTC miners

2025/12/09 14:02

For years, most BTC holders didn’t think twice about where their mining equipment came from. Bitmain—this massive Beijing-based manufacturer—just kept shipping Antminers to warehouses in Texas, Kazakhstan, Paraguay, wherever. As long as the rigs worked and the hash rate kept climbing, nobody really cared. That casual attitude died this month when the U.S. government launched a national-security investigation into Bitmain and its stranglehold on global mining hardware. They’re calling it Operation Red Sunset, which should tell you how seriously they’re taking this.

Here’s what has Washington spooked: Bitmain controls approximately 80% of the world’s Bitcoin mining equipment. And basically every modern Antminer can be accessed remotely through firmware updates. Theoretically, one command pushed from their headquarters in China could throttle, redirect, or completely brick a huge chunk of the BTC network’s processing power. Intelligence officials worry that Beijing could exploit that access directly, or force Bitmain to do it during some future crisis—Taiwan keeps coming up in these conversations. Making things messier, one of Bitmain’s biggest recent customers is American Bitcoin, a mining operation backed by Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump. So yeah, that’s added some urgency to the whole thing.

American Bitcoin ordered 16,000 high-end rigs earlier this year for a new facility somewhere in the Midwest. The irony isn’t subtle: a company connected to the incoming first family is now at the center of an investigation designed to reduce foreign control over critical U.S. infrastructure. From what I’m hearing, investigators are especially interested in whether those machines have hidden backdoors or telemetry channels that Beijing could flip on without anyone knowing.

Bitmain claims that its remote-management tools are solely for customer support and monitoring efficiency. They insist that no government has ever made them insert malicious code. But those reassurances don’t mean much to people who remember what happened with Huawei and ZTE. Once Washington decides a tech vendor is too risky, the commercial arguments quickly lose their significance.

This investigation goes way beyond Bitmain, though. The Commerce Department apparently set an internal deadline—December 2025—to shift at least 50% of new BTC mining capacity onto American or allied hardware. Lawmakers from both parties are already drafting bills that would slap steep tariffs on Chinese-made miners and offer accelerated depreciation for operators who switch to domestic brands. We’re talking about Auradine, Marathon’s (NASDAQ: MARA) upcoming MARA Miner, and Intel’s (NASDAQ: INTC) Blockscale line, which they previously killed but are now apparently reviving.

Miners are stuck in a really awkward spot right now. The newest Bitmain S21 XP Hydros still have the best joules-per-terahash efficiency on the planet, and it’s not even close. Switching to less efficient machines right now means hemorrhaging money at a time when BTC is sitting below $84,000, and electricity costs keep going up. Many public mining companies have informed their investors that they’ll operate their existing Chinese fleets until the hardware literally fails, then determine what to do next. But privately? Executives admit the political risk is getting impossible to ignore.

Inside China, Bitmain’s already adapting. They opened a small assembly plant in Malaysia, and they’re negotiating for a second one in Vietnam—pretty obvious moves to keep shipping containers flowing even if direct U.S. exports get banned. Long-term, though, nobody really believes China’s going to give up its lead in semiconductor fab and mining-chip design without pushing back hard.

For BTC itself, the timing is genuinely terrible. Hash rate is near all-time highs, but profitability has tanked to levels we haven’t seen since the 2022 bear market. Forcing a rapid hardware transition risks a nasty drop in total hash rate right when the ecosystem can’t afford it. Some veterans I’ve talked to are quietly worried that a botched migration could temporarily hand a 51% advantage to whichever pools keep their Bitmain rigs running the longest.

This doesn’t mean everything will fall apart tomorrow. The network’s survived way worse. But Operation Red Sunset marks the point where BTC mining stopped being just another industry and turned into a piece of great-power competition. Those machines that used to feel like neutral tools? They carry geopolitical weight now. Miners who’ve spent years obsessing over watts and uptime suddenly have to think about sovereignty too.

Whether Washington’s freaking out for good reason or overreacting, one thing seems pretty clear: the days when the average BTC user could ignore who actually manufactures the hardware are done.

Watch: Untangling Bitcoin mining at the CoinGeek Weekly Livestream

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Source: https://coingeek.com/the-shadow-over-bitmain-why-washington-now-eyes-btc-miners/

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