Chinese Internet Cafe Owners Deal With the Pandemic Crisis by Using Their Facilities to Mine Cryptocurrencies

The Coronavirus pandemic has driven people to take advantage of new business lines to deal with the economic crisis, and cryptocurrency is once again a headliner. Internet cafe owners in China are using their facilities to set up crypto mining farms after temporarily shutting down in 2020.

Owners Are Earning Around $6,200 Monthly

According to Sina, quoting a recently published report, almost 13,000 internet-fueled cafes that operate 24 hours a day, are depending on their high-end computers to mine digital assets, as their PCs were originally conditioned for gamers.

Some of them claim to earn over 40,000 yuan ($6,200) worth in virtual currencies on a monthly basis.

The report states that some owners are even using 200 computers to run mining operations. Wang Xi, a Chinese internet cafe proprietary, commented that the attendance in his business is still “not high.”

“Working days are less than 50%, and mining is done when computers are idle,” he added.

The cafe-based mining farm owner claims to have earned over 200,000 yuan ($31,000) since September 2020. He stated that some of his colleagues turned to digital asset mining because of its profitability:

Due to the impact of last year’s epidemic, Internet cafes were closed for a long time, and the flow of people was not particularly large. Only recently has it improved slightly. As far as I know, most Internet cafes in the entire Nantong urban area have chosen to mine.

He also provided further technical details on his mining rig:

I have a shop computer that uses a 1060 5GB graphics card. The mining power is 15 MB, and the income per trillion is 0.8 yuan. If you calculate the amount of 100 computers, the monthly income is 37,000 yuan ($5,750). The electricity consumption in the industry is only 0.6 yuan/kWh.

South Korean Internet Cafe Owners Are Also Profiting From Crypto Mining

Another owner quoted by the report, Zhang Li, who talked under a pseudonym, believes “mining is definitely the best choice that can be made within the scope of limited resources.” Crypto mining already allowed him to yield profits of around $7,750 monthly.

This maneuver to deal with the pandemic-driven crisis is not the first-of-its-kind in Asia. As Bitcoin.com News reported early this year, cafe internet owners, known as “PC bangs,” in Seoul, South Korea, are mining ether (ETH). The PC bangs are also relying on highly-end computers with top-notch graphic cards in the wake of the Covid-19 crisis.