It's not super easy for Chinese nationals to move to Taiwan (Due to regular threats from Chinese generals, blocking Taiwan's bid to join the UN repeatedly for decades, "Anti-secession" laws requiring invading TW, etc).

Even setting the political issues aside, Taiwan, Thailand and Macau are all pretty bad choices. They don't have particularly cheap power and they're hot, which drives up cooling and thus power requirements.

Iceland is still pretty much ideal. It has cheap Geothermal power and natural cooling.

http://www.businessinsider.com/photos-of-iceland-bitcoin-eth...

Kazakhstan has cheaper electricity than Iceland. It has the second coldest capital in the world and has an extensive border with China.

They will relocate to where ever electricity is the cheapest. Labor costs aren't a factor.

Perhaps the electricity use might be something the Chinese government cares about? "That power plant is polluting our place and you guys aren't employing anyone. Sooo..."

Just sayin.

It's almost all hydro power every thing else is too expensive to be competitive.

If the miners weren't tapping all the hydro power they wouldn't have to burn as much coal to power the rest of the country.

Miner is an ideal consumer of the electricity, doesn't have peak hours, can put equipment near the hydro power plant, so it is very likely a lot of this energy has been just wasted before c. 2013-2014.

The entire Bitcoin network consumes about 2GW at the moment, which is something but not much compared to China's total generation capacity which iirc is something like 900GW

Probably less, see http://blog.zorinaq.com/bitcoin-electricity-consumption/#eco...

Electricity in Vietnam is expensive. I doubt it would be practical to mine Bitcoin here.