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Comment by dumbfoundded | Hacker News Reader

Only in the destination country. Let's say someone in China wanted to move $$$$ out of China for whatever reason. They could use yuan to purchase mining hardware and use that to generate clean wallets with no identity attached. A good friend of this person is an artist in the UK. The artist cashes in the ETH, properly reports taxes from income, and now has a completely clean and clear source of cash. Now if the Chinese person wants to get out of China in a hurry, they can visit their close friend in the UK.

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Being generous you can mine ~$10 of crypto per day with a 3080 based on its hashrate, zero electricity cost.

So to transfer $1 million out over 3 years, you'd need to run mine ~$900 of crypto per day, ie. run 90 RTX3080s 24/7/365.

Also note that this would draw around 20kW.

[1] https://www.nicehash.com/profitability-calculator/nvidia-rtx...

Googling I see the price of a 3080 is 700 dollars, so this would cost 700 * 90 = 63,000. Plus electricity, which, maybe you can get cheap somehow in China if you have the right friends. Seems like an amount this size is pretty small compared to what you're moving. If you think bitcoin will go up long term then the cost might work out to be negative.

> Googling I see the price of a 3080 is 700 dollars

assuming you're able to buy them and have the money upfront and are able to hide the purchase.

"What this person could be doing with 90 3080, I wonder" asks the Chinese government employee that checks your bank transactions.

https://www.techradar.com/news/nvidia-rtx-3080-shortage-coul...

Training facial recognition models for the CCP of course.

NiceHash shows a profitability of $9/day (1) given $0.08/kwh which is average in China (2). So to get a positive return on your investment assuming a cost of $700 per card, it takes less than 80 days. Never before have you been able to launder and invest your money at the same time.

The questions of number of cards and electricity usage are pretty secondary and easy enough to hide. Go off grid, setup a similar legitimate company, lots of options to hide it.

This is backed by the fact the vast majority of hash power for BTC comes from China (3). There are world wide shortages for sha asics and gpus. I'm not describing a hypothetical.

(1) https://www.nicehash.com/profitability-calculator/nvidia-rtx...

(2) https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/China/electricity_prices/

(3) https://www.statista.com/statistics/731416/market-share-of-m...

I'm sitting here more like how can I get money into China and access their markets, like pretty much every western capital institution at the moment, that's the the whole thing about the trade deal phase 1 how can black rock like institutions carve up a bigger piece of the China pie. Wouldn't be surprised if the US is using its mainstream media machine to sabotage the EU-China deal, so they can also claim up EU part of the China pie.

Its like kind of like the unequal treaties but now china can fight back and as small concession for less aggressive approach, offered a small piece of the China pie for the outsiders to fight over. Let the outsiders fight among themselves instead of letting them fight together against you.

Isn't the cap like $25k/year/person that's like top 5~10% of the global citizens that can save up like $25k per year.

Western govs are going to let greedy capital pour into China and thus monetarily support the CCP finishing the civil war against the Taiwanese people in a couple of years?

Once the US and EU if/have succeeded in building their own semi conductor supply lines, Taiwan will just be disposed off like some old used condom.

Taiwan's silicon shield and western semi conductor independence are contradicting objectives, sacrificing Taiwan for a bigger piece of the Chinese market is more then worth it from a realist/Mercantilism perspective.

Yeah but the CCP then controls that first island chain and easily squeeze off Japan and SK. US carriers are kept far away by stationing missiles on Taiwan. Thus they can continually stake out control.

The US investing in the Chinese "pie" is useless because they're just feeding the CCP more. CCP will use the power to take over the world. US companies would get eaten by the Chinese companies and US gov would be taken over from within, once mainstream and social media is taken over by CCP hands.

See the US losing is not really my problem, the current cold war was started some years ago and only the future will tell how this will end. Taiwan will hardly add to the Chinese ant ship missile shield, putting more space assets in the region will offer a more accurate kill chain. I wouldn't be surprised that South Korea is already in the Eurasian camp or at least neutral there's a reason they are not part of the quad. Don't listen to words look for the actions of each player, because words are cheap but actions aren't.

But don't be afraid of China taking over US cyberspace, I wouldn't be surprised that the Anglo-Europeans will build their Hadrian fire wall. To keep the Eurasian troll armies out of their part of the cyber world. This might all grow out of the clean network initiative.

Ok but if the CCP is authoritarian and takes control of everything, it will be your problem. Unless you are part of the CCP, or just a troll.

The king is dead, long live the King...

For most non westerns nothing will really change if the king sits in Washington or Beijing. If you think it does you have been drowned in US propaganda. Maybe the biggest historical difference is that Beijing builds, and Washington bombs cities in the global south.

Hah, you clearly don't have a balanced view. US doesn't install pure puppet oligarchs and mass surveillance tech. CCP does whatever it takes to expand economic influence and tighten their autocratic control.

TLDR: CCP doesn't answer to the people. US gov at least has open elections.

I agree that at this moment, a poor person in central africa should not care 1% between US and CCP. But for their descendants, yes they should care.

I believe this is how it works at the beginning, and I consider it as the main use of crypto in China. It was actually easier when exchange was legal in China, you can just buy bitcoin. Even now, you can use AliPay, WeChat and bank transfer to do P2P crypto transaction.

it looks pretty complicated for a person who wants to send money (illegally) out of China and clean it up.

The easiest thing for China would be monitor crypto transactions and stop them from happening.

But suppose you are Chinese and have a good friend in UK who's going to report as legit income the result of your criminal activity in China (criminal as in simply hiding the money from the government, for whatever reason) on your behalf.

Why should you set this complex scheme up when you could simply fly to UK to visit your artist friend, buy one of his artwork with your yuan and you're done?

Or better yet, invite your UK friend to China and give him the money, that he can then deposit on his account.

Purchasing mining hardware or artworks with your money that can be trace back to you it's the exact same thing.

> Why should you set this complex scheme up when you could simply fly to UK to visit your artist friend, buy one of his artwork with your yuan and you're done?

> Or better yet, invite your UK friend to China and give him the money, that he can then deposit on his account.

China has capital controls and dual currencies to prevent these common scenarios. The yuan that the Chinese resident can get from a Chinese bank is devalued outside of China, and it is forbidden to move large quantities anyway (much less than the 1M USD mentioned in the thread).

https://statrys.com/blog/cnh-vs-cny-differences-chinese-renm...

> China has capital controls and dual currencies to prevent these common scenarios

that's why you buy stuff in yuan and sell the stuff for dollars/euro or other currencies

BTW we are talking about criminal activities here (money laundering), of course there's a price to pay and that price usually is in the 20-40% range (I've checked CNY and CNH and they are being traded at very similar rates right now [1][2])

there's no need to buy hundreds of GPU to mine crypto to do what the OP intended to do

unless OP meant btc it's a cheaper and safer way to launder money, which is a good reason why people could think it's a scam

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/quote/USDCNY:CUR

[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/quote/USDCNH:CUR

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