It didn't stop those miners, it just forced them to move out of China (mostly to the US). And it clearly did temporarily stop it as that was happening, as a look at any bitcoin hashrate graph[1] will show, because it halved shortly after the ban was announced.

And according to the University of Cambridge, that has a bitcoin electricity consumption index tracker, they have a visualization of the countries contributing the most to the hashrate, and you can see China go down to basically zero in July 2021 and stay that way (see the 'Evolution of network hashrate' chart[2]).

[1] https://bitcoinmagazine.com/markets/bitcoin-hash-rate-full-r...

[2] https://ccaf.io/cbeci/mining_map

Interesting. This doesn't make sense to me though because I thought part of the reason so much mining was happening in China is miners were taking advantage of electricity subsidies.

Edit: This suggests that they are likely using VPNs and mining pools to do it.

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/18/chinas-underground-bitcoin-m...

> Although Beijing exiled its crypto miners in May and then doubled down on its mining ban in September and again in November, multiple sources tell CNBC that as much as 20% of all the world’s bitcoin miners remain in China.

Still, "most mining", has definitely been stopped.

I was also very surprised to see it drop to 0% in that chart too, especially considering I saw an article a few days ago that China vowed to hunt down and stop all bitcoin miners in their country within a year, but I didn't see any other data to suggest otherwise.

So yeah, I believe that article that there could still be 20% of mining hiding somewhere within China and using VPNs.

But it definitely resulted in a big shift away from China, regardless.