China to Shut Bitcoin Exchanges?
wsj.com
wsj.com
https://mobile.twitter.com/cnLedger/status/90709502238582374...
This would allow them to associate an identity behind most inbound and outbound Bitcoin transactions to/from the exchange...
"Perfect control, classic China" as a Twitter user said.
just one example of how weak the writing is on mr. robot. the basis of everything must be "Lol hackers bro amirite?"
I say the writing on Mr. Robot is quite good...in fact I would say it ranks as the top quality of hacker speak of all popular modern TV.
It's an option to do that, of course, but it would be precedent-setting. No one else bans BTC that came in via a Monero service.
• Original Caixin Report that sparked all this: http://finance.caixin.com/2017-09-08/101142797.html
• (RECOMMENDED) Good English translation of above article: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1sNYGpwj3EKkRhlejoycytZLq...
• Shorter English announcement from Caixin: http://www.caixinglobal.com/2017-09-09/101142821.html
• Coindesk article pointing out Caixin has been spot-on in the past (re their Sep 2 leak regarding ICO fundraising): https://www.coindesk.com/report-casts-doubt-future-chinas-bi...
• Related official news out of China regarding ICO ban: https://www.reddit.com/r/ethtrader/comments/6ywtkt/the_actua...
• Tweet from CEO of ViaBTC saying "China will shut down all exchanges": https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/viabtc-ceo-china-will-ban-bi...
It's not the first time China's cracked down on virtual currency <--> fiat trading, but if true this could be more intense than their prior efforts.
(Note this is a repost of my comment made to a previous HackerNews article on the topic)
Things like this will happen and need to be discussed. It appears that the ban will be for the trade of fiat for Bitcoin. Everything else, including p2p trade, will be allowed. So, the price of Bitcoin will fall a little more, but, eventually, they will find ways to get crypto currency.
Maybe a new coin, maybe more regulations or maybe people2people trades will be the future. There are already several great products emerging that do not need exchanges to trade crypto like 0x, Kyber.Network and even Ethertrade.
In Chinese society, the citizens expect the government to protect them from harm, whether the government is responsible for them or not. On the other hand, the government values stability above everything else, in order to maintain their regime. Now, there's this ICO thing, which has the potential to scam millions of Chinese (and trust me, it will happen), who will inevitably protest until their money is returned, you wonder what's gonna happen…
People have received DEATH SENTENCE before for scamming investors[1]. Let that sink in.
edit: someone mentioned capital control. While I agree this is probably one of the reasons, I doubt it's the biggest. Sure, having money flowing out of the country gives the government headache, compared to having thousands of people on the street holding signs, it seems like a rather minor one. Plus, if you want to move millions of dollars, you probably won't trust whatever-coin to do the job. There are tons of ways of doing that, and the government has bigger fish to fry.
> “The company was endorsed by Chinese government officials, and Wang, now the chief executive, was photographed with the former Minister of Commerce of the People's Republic of China, Bo Xilai.”
Mao would disagree.
Historically there have been more stories like this than I can count where some random source claims the PBOC is going to "ban Bitcoin" and it has always proven to be false. The worst that has happened is the tightening of regulations on Bitcoin exchange providers. There is even a common meme that has been going around for years.[0]
Sorry, Caixin and WSJ and Bloomberg are not "some random source". I know "China bans Bitcoin" has been a joke meme in the community for years, but this time it's the real deal.
"Given what you know today (and how blockchain, cryptocurrencies, and decentralized networks work), would you still design the financial system and other systems (ex. identity, currencies, etc) the same way they are designed today?"
My answer is no, and that's why I'm still bullish on decentralized technology and systems winning in the long-term. In that case, investments in Bitcoin and Ethereum are merely call options for an entirely new financial world and a risk still worth betting on.
The reason for the fork to cash was because the dev team wanted to keep the network inefficent to benefit miner rewards at the expense of users, along with justifying the lightning network, with Blockstream having 9+ bitcoin core developers on their payroll.
And? You retain control because you can exit, this is the point of having cryptocurrency. It is a voluntary process. And for "democratic" development process... I'm amazed that this point is being brought up. Show me successful software project that is being "democratically" controlled.
There's well more than 3 mining pools.
As everyone saw one day the founder of Ethereum was meeting with Putin and sending out press releases of potential partnership, the next Putin is putting out his own press releases questioning why he would ever embrace any foreign blockchain/crypto, that Russia will launch its own.
If cryptocurrency can be regulated by individual countries like we saw with china this last week, then I expect the underlying blockchain technology can be regulated too, and we will begin seeing countries picking winners, basically who can be a node on the blockchain and who can mine.
People think/thought blockchain equivalent to an automated unregulatable technology, but once you are talking about billions you impact people with power, they will raise and lower price at their will and take the people's technology from them through regulation.
You don't even need any explicit regulation - a country-level firewall will likely fork the chain.
[1] https://cointelegraph.com/news/russia-is-working-on-legalizi...
I believe BTC's price is inherently a weighted random walk driven by speculation rather than rational reasons. Not everyone shares this belief, and it's human nature to look for explanations when there aren't any.
(An unknowable explanation is still unknowable.)
Yes it did: (though I assume you mean over the longer term, but I don't think that's how most would read that comment)
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/oct/03/bitcoin-p...
The article even says this:
On Wednesday afternoon the price of one Bitcoin (BTC) was $145.70 on Mt Gox, one of the largest exchanges for the currency.
After the news that Ross Ulbricht had been arrested and the Silk Road site seized, the exchange rate plummeted to a low of $109.76, before recovering to $124.00 late on Thursday.
Translation: "BTC went from $145 to $124 and then continued to go up."
How far are we going to zoom in to say that BTC dropped? An hour? A minute? A day is not a useful time interval.
Using the lowest point of the day also isn't useful. Traders typically use a moving average. Neither the lowest nor the highest peak is a useful way to compute the price of bitcoin for the day.
If you're going to wag your finger and say "Nu uh" and trot out data saying that it went down to X price, well, yes, you're technically correct. But I think most people would agree that the price over the next week is a far more useful way to know whether the price truly dropped or not.
In other words, if China's ban results in BTC dropping for a day, who cares? No one.
Here's a chart of the immediate drop and rebound, where you see it didn't recover to the price pre-announcement:
https://www.wired.com/wp-content/uploads/blogs/wiredenterpri...
"The price went over $5000 for one day. That does not count as a peak." "Using the hightest point of the day also isn't useful. Traders typically use a moving average. Neither the lowest nor the highest peak is a useful way to compute the price of bitcoin for the day." "If you're going to wag your finger and say "Nu uh" and trot out data saying that it went up to X price, well, yes, you're technically correct. But I think most people would agree that the price over the next week is a far more useful way to know whether the price truly went over $4900 or not." "In other words, if BTC went over $4900 for a day, who cares? No one."
Yet in any conversation of price, that $5000+ ATH is the watermark.
I've already responded to your points, but let's rehash it again: Silk road closed, and everyone expected BTC to completely fucking fail. It did not. In fact, it barely went down. It also recovered swiftly.
If you want to call that a drop, go ahead! Personally, I'd save that classification for when BTC dropped from $1100 to $300, for example. But sure, a 15% decrease for one day followed by a recovery over the following week could count, I guess.
Most of my thoughts are driven by what passes for dialog at r/bitcoin and elsewhere in the community. To the moon! This is gentlemen! rollercoaster.gif! I would definitely agree that listening to hyperbole, wherever it comes from, is foolish.
[1] $7M [2] OKCoin.cn alone does $100M a day on the BTC/CNY pair.
Presumably most of that BTC/CNY trading is being traded for capital gains, not as a way to try to evade currency controls.
Moreover most big mining operations use alternative energy sources, usually hydropower.
Regulators in China have been investigating the domestic market for bitcoin and other virtual currencies since the beginning of the year. For a while, officials considered enacting antimoney-laundering rules on exchanges, even circulating a draft of such rules for them to follow."
OkCoin prices are still going up. The only "important" person that has said this would happen was the VIABTC CEO on twitter. Nobody believes, but now, I think is true
Forcing users to Subscribe or Sign In to read the content while allowing the search engine crawlers without any barriers should be considered as malpractice. This was exactly the kind of stuff Quora was doing but at least they had the decency of doing this on users coming from internal links.
At the worst btc will fall and another might take its place. I would see these developments are exciting because the decentralization part hasn't been tested much. certainly not by a nation state actor. If BTC survives this, it will truly shine.
Or imprison/execute those found participating in cryptocurrencies. China does both fairly often for other crimes.
If a satellite link can bypass government controls, why has it not been used by Google, FB, New York Times and numerous others banned in China?
So it seems like "receiving BTC from wallets not impacted by the firewall" is the only functional use case for the satellite feed.
Regulators will likely to have to tolerate noncommercial trading of virtual currencies. “The government also doesn’t have the power to control” that.
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Centralized exchanges have always been the achilles heel of cryptocurrency ecosystem.
Better to keep it distributed with (a) smart contracts and (b) lightning network.
If China bans the exchanges now, they basically opt-out from the value created by the flow of some of these billions. Sure, the prices and daily volumes would drop on the short/medium term, but this would only give one last chance to people left out to join and buy crypto at low prices. When the market cap and prices would grow back, China would be left out. Who would trust them anymore to start a blockchain business there?
There is no "win" for China (the state) by letting its population freely speculate and trade in crypto that they don't control... much better to shut it down.
In other news, water is wet.