Hacker News Reader

Comment by Iv | Hacker News Reader

No. China has been pretty open and friendly to bitcoin so far.

What they fear is Ponzi pyramid schemes damaging the economy. Several ICOs have reached a billion USD without any product and often anonymously. These can bankrupt whole areas of a country. Now is the time to stop them.

Remember that their growth is exponential and one at a billion already puts it high in the history of Ponzi schemes (Ponzi himself 'only' caused around 200 millions. Madoff is the recordman with between 50 to 150 billions). Let them grow for more generations and there is a very big risk even for national economies.

View on HN

It's not just the size of the population, but also how young financial markets are in China. For the vast majority of Chinese citizens, any kind of financial product is new or at most a generation old.

They don't have 1930s collapses or Madoff or Enron or 2007 collapse in their cultural DNA to build immunity against scammy speculators.

As a result of this, China's markets are overwhelmingly populated by retail investors who are more vulnerable to kind of ICO schemes we're tired of seeing in HN.

https://www.ft.com/content/e5af8da0-1fc7-11e5-aa5a-398b2169c...

Exactly. Even highly-placed officials, like the former PBoC governor, explicitely said they did NOT want to kill Bitcoin: https://themerkle.com/former-pboc-governor-we-need-to-regula...

No, that is not their fear. Governments barely care about scams in general - Madoff got off pretty lightly. The fear is losing control of monetary policy. But IMO governments won't outright ban these but come to some sort of middle ground where they get some sort of cut.

Then they should have banned all cryptocurrencies and ban exchanges/miners. But they specifically targeted ICOs. If they were worried about losing control of monetary policy you'd think they would ban others as well?

"Madoff got off pretty lightly"

He was sentenced to 150 years. «Lightly.»

"I'm not ashamed to admit it. When we arrived to prison, I was absolutely terrified. But I needn't have been. See, for a brief fleeting moment, I'd forgotten I was rich and I lived in a place where everything was for sale."

Madoff's money was seized, 80 millions were given back to debtors. He got sentenced to 150 years in jail. His son had to pay millions in damage too. I am not sure what you mean by "lightly".

Absolutely disagree. The amount of scamming and corruption (at least in the western perspective) in the Chinese economy is mind-boggling and they don't bat an eye at it.

The CCP cares about population destabilization and independence movements above all things. Economic control starting at the provincial level up through the CCP is job 1. The CCP is very watchful over their provincial governors getting too much power and alternative currencies offer them a potential way for provinces to exploit their local power.

Scams and corruption are one thing, exponentially growing pyramid schemes are another. If you are a market regulator who don't have the resources to go after all the wrongdoings, going after the >$1B pyramid schemes are your priority.

Some countries like Albania had very damaging scams that implied a sizeable percentage of their economy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com