China - 0.11 USD/kWh
Saudi Arabia - 0.07 USD/kWh (call it close to a ~1/3 discount w/respect to China?)
United States - 0.18 USD/kWh (call it close to a ~1/3 premium w/respect to China?)
Wikipedia shows results that are not conflicting, though in stating it as a range, it is hard to make any firm declarations:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_pricing
though clearly, the bottom of China's range (0.04 USD/kWh) is well in excess of the bottom of other districts' range (e.g., India at 0.001 USD/kWh).
Yes, being close to the assembly houses, those being close to the PCBA stuffers, and those being close to the semiconductor fabs are an advantage. But not an insurmountable one.
I'm just trying to point out that the insistence upon power costs being an intractable barrier to entry in the Bitcoin mining space is nothing but a canard.
I guess you would have a lot of pain in the ass if you were trying to mine Bitcoin in Saudi Arabia
Mining is the primary source of new bitcoins entering the market. Controlling the offer side of the orderbooks essentially means that you can manipulate the price of Bitcoin in certain limits. If control over Bitcoin price is not control of Bitcoin itself, what would then count as control? If the Chinese miners can outright shut down Bitcoin should they decide so (or someone decides for them), would that pass as control?
What does control mean after all?
Chinese mining pools have a sort of exclusive veto over future updates to Bitcoin, since they most likely have over 51% of hashing power. I assume this is enough to say that they control Bitcoin. Besides, we don't really know how many individual miners from all over the world these pools actually consist of. I'm more inclined to think that these mining pools are in fact located in one place (a few places) and are represented by a few huge mining farms, not thousands of individual miners...
I don't mean to say that individual miners can't mine there, but the bulk of hashing power is still provided by these farms