China was once bitcoin paradise. Then Beijing banned the trading and “mining” of the cryptocurrency and the industry beat a path to, of all places, Texas.

The shift has been stunning in its speed and severity, and the implications are potentially profound for the $1.1 trillion currency being adopted by a growing number of financial institutions.

To recap, two years ago, roughly 75 per cent of the computing power on which bitcoin runs was based in China, mostly in the form of warehouses packed to the gills with computers. New coins are generated, and transactions processed, by the solving of complex cryptographic puzzles. The immense computing power that this requires is known in the industry as “hashrate”.

China’s dominance led to worries that the government.