China declares cryptocurrency deals ‘illegal’
dailybusinessgroup.co.uk
dailybusinessgroup.co.uk
What has been announced now (by the Chinese central bank and a bunch of regulators) is that all crypto related transactions will be banned.
But either way, it greatly limits the value of cryptocurrencies (and related concepts) in China.
Crypto is now purely black market currency in China.
https://news.yahoo.com/chinas-central-bank-rules-crypto-0944...
Though to be honest I don't understand how bitcoin can be used for getting money out of the country. Who would be willing to accept onshore CNY in payment for bitcoin in volumes if everyone is trying to move out?
I suspect the recent crackdown is more related to a fear of uncontrolled capital flight due to regulatory changes and anticipated slowdown of the economy.
I'm guessing it has to do with preventing people from moving wealth out of the country.
China has "banned Bitcoin" dozens of times over the last decade. I mean, this is an ancient and well-known meme involving a certain South Park clip after all.
Maybe this time is for real, but all of these media announcements have one thing in common. They always conflate the concept of "legal tender" and "legality."
The number of authorities around the world who have warned citizens about Bitcoin using language like "no legal tender status" and "risky" and "no government guarantee" is legion. Easily thousands of times. Every time "journalists" with no business reporting on tech, law, or foreign governments interpret this as a "ban." 99% of the time, nothing happens and there is no ban.
So, maybe this time is different. Over the last year, an initiative toward greater centralized control seems to be underway in China's tech and finance sectors. Disappearing of wealthy founders. Restrictions on video game consumption. The three red lines. The ejection of the Chinese mining industry.
Then again, maybe not.
This is a false narrative pushed by the Bitcoin cult. It's supposed to create an impression that nothing has changed, so the price should not change.
2013: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-12-05/china-s-p...
2015: https://archive.is/Higoz
2017: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-bitcoin-china-idUSKCN1BJ1...
2018: https://www.businessinsider.com/china-eliminates-all-cryptoc...
2021: https://archive.is/s7nbw
"China Has Banned Bitcoin 13 Times Since 2012":
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/china-great-bitcoin-mining-mi...
https://old.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/search?q=china+ban+bitcoin&...
My market perspective:
"Everything is priced in."
Apparently, not in the crypto markets. Old news is new news, apparently.
Policy perspective:
The more DeFi becomes a thing, the less a policy like this will matter. It will still matter a lot, but it will pack less of a punch due to decentralized services.
My overall perspective:
If crypto still feels as speculative (in terms of trading crypto) 10 years later, then I feel the experiment to find a good use-case has ran for long enough.
Maybe I'm taking this to a place you didn't intend, or maybe this is an ignorant question but. . . .
What is the US market now, compared to 10 years ago. My experience is that 10 years ago Bitcoin was used to either buy drugs, or as a bet made by college kids that they could make easy money.
And. Well. It seems still pretty much the same in terms of existing primarily as a speculative tool.
These things actually have huge meaningful state security risks. Not too long ago the entire country of Albania got swept up in Ponzi schemes. It go so bad, they imprisoned their finance minister for trying to stop it. Then they had a civil war about it. The IMF had to airdrop in bags of money to bail them out. [1]
1997 Albania is what the maxis are working towards.
In this case the PRC not only has the moral high ground, but also is acting out of a real, rational fear of economic collapse.
If America had any sense, it would put the ban hammer down on this before it gets any worse.
[1] https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2000/03/jarvis.ht...
Speak against the government--you're no longer allowed to transact in society.
Retroactive tax...boom, negative balance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_United...
But maybe someone from China can chime in and explain how serious the enforcement of these bans will be. I have seen countries with all kinds of laws, none ever enforced.
You mean something like old Reserve Act of 1934 in the US?
Your worldview is ridiculous.
Plebs cannot be allowed to have access to sound money, otherwise financial parasites can’t exists.
Chinese citizens can invest in the former, but (via government currency exchange controls) can't participate meaningfully in the latter.
So if China exits global stock markets... there isn't that much Chinese money being pulled out of them, because there wasn't that much in them.
What money China is investing internationally appears to mostly go to bonds, construction financing, and asset leases / purchases.
PS: What this appears to really be about is severing links for extraordinarily wealthy Chinese citizens to move money outside the reach of the PRC.
Which, if you were running an expansionist monetary policy intended to facilitate domestic economic growth, while simultaneously cracking down on the wealthy in pursuit of equality, is presumably something you'd take very seriously (as a command economy). Lest all that new & old money just fly offshores.
The problem with high inflation is that it usually (but not recently) goes hand in hand with higher interest rates (i.e. money costs more). Which tends to discourage business borrowing, which acts as a damper on non-financial investment (i.e. spending on factories, marketing, R&D, etc.). This has the effect of slowing down economic growth.
On the other hand, high inflation/high interest rate environments tend to arise when growth is high. Because high growth tends to go hand in hand with a rise in wages, increases in demand (which shifts the demand curve, and thus raises prices), increases in financial speculation, etc.
There are a ton more "on the other hands". Economic analysis is complex and difficult because it's a tangled mess of interdependent feedback loops that constantly change. A single policy action has an avalanche of cascading effects, some of which will be counter to the policy objective. I'm not suggesting humanity should just roll over in the face of this challenge. We should just be aware that it's a "hard problem" and there are never any simple solutions.
No mining needed.
China can't ban 2 (or perhaps they could by putting the great firewall into overdrive) so they are banning 1.
However I'm not entirely clear from the article exactly what the status of crypto in china now is. It's not clear to me from the quoted statement if it is actually illegal to use crypto to pay for something or to hold or transfer it, or if it's something a bit more subtle and limited.
There are A LOT scams going on with all coins, people put money into it without knowing anything about cryptocurrency. If you read recent news about Evergrande, when Chinese people invest money for speculation, no one is considering the risk of losing money. I wonder if this has something to do with this.
*$50k bitcoin/gold if bought today
I would hold BTC for a 100 year horizon. I wouldn't hold it for a 500 year horizon. Actually I would not hold any asset for a 500 year horizon (including gold): I don't have kids and I don't think I will have to worry at that time.
[1] https://www.banxico.org.mx/marco-normativo/d/%7B097567D4-647...
I mean, yes that would be one way. But apart from that, they don't need to find every last one. Nobody cares about a miner making $0.5 per day on their GPU. The target is the big mining farms drawing multiple megawatts of electricity and you can just ask the power company for the address of anyone using that much electricity. There can't be _that_ many of them, so just visit them all and see if they are running a legit power-intensive business like a metal foundry or if it is a crypto mining farm.
Bottom of the line is always going to be if you can exchange crypto for goods. If most people feel that the crypto is worthless, the value will plunge and the buyer pool will as well.
How hard could it be for the Chinese government to identify suspiciously large amounts of power use? Malaysia of all places recently managed to seize and destroy around a thousand bitcoin mining rigs.
It's definitely not impossible to obfuscate and use crypto even in a country where it's banned, but it isn't that easy.
1. Radio transmitters are by definition easy to detect: once you get identified, you are in a world of trouble because you demonstrated full knowledge that you were doing something illegal. Anything which can be used to circumvent the Great Firewall will be treated as a threat to state security even if you personally are only using it for a less serious crime.
2. Blockchains are a censor's dream: you have a full signed confession of every transaction made by the person you just compromised and a list of everyone they corresponded with. If you catch someone new and have ways to get them to talk (China has a well-honed system for this), now you have that for all of their past transactions, too. Have a few undercover agents tell people about this mesh networking app and you can quietly roll up an entire network over time while making it look like the police just happened to get lucky breaks a lot.
3. Blockchains are hard to conceal: they require huge amounts of data transfer and you have to be online at the time you make a transaction, both of which dramatically increase the challenges of trying to be covert.
All of those combine into a huge problem for using blockchains: you don't need to worry about any of that or the extra expense _unless_ you're doing something illegal. That means that simply participating is inherently risky — better hope that you don't ever make internet traffic which would show an interest in this or have someone audit the apps installed on your devices — and the costs are guaranteed to be high because everyone involved is taking on the extra risk of whatever you're doing (and the chance that you're not being completely honest about the level of risk or are compromised) leading to scrutiny and/or that you will fail your opsec in a way which provides proof of their noncompliance.
No matter what you think of the Chinese system or whether it's right, it seems like a system designed to expose its users to significant risk in addition to whatever it is that they're trying to hide.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFp86n7QCf0
This analysis suggests that the value of tracking every financial transaction will eventually cause governments to all want to institute there own crypto currencies and eventually outlaw independent crypto currencies.
"Excellent news" would be the halting of state subsidies for coal mining, and introduction of a carbon tax.
They will probably never stop subsidizing coal mining though. Otherwise they will get even more reliant on foreign coal which gives a hypothetical US blockade much more clout.
Sure, but in most cases people would, at best, be seriously inconvenienced if they were immediately banned. At worst, people would die.
If bitcoin was banned worldwide tomorrow, it would be an interesting story in the news and the internet would be furious for a while; there would be no significant real-life impact. It would probably be the most slam-dunk "obviously we should do this" environmental regulation in history; even things like "we should not put mercury in lakes" had significant downsides compared to banning bitcoin.
So far bitcoin has negative utility even aside from environmental disaster (ransomware).
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
A few years ago people laughed at me for buying bitcoin, it's good to see bitcoin adoption moving along nicely.
If you mean "proof of stake" - I've never heard anyone describe any environmental issues with them, so I assume that they either don't exist or are far smaller in impact than PoW.
If you mean "proof of storage/space" - it seems like that tends to produce very high write volumes, which in turn burns SSDs out very quickly[1] - and you can argue that that's bad for the environment. How bad, and whether it's worse than the energy consumption of PoW, I'm not sure. From one perspective, it's worse, because you could theoretically power PoW mining using exclusively green energy, but you can't pull the raw materials for SSDs out of thin air.
But this world is not static. Let's say for example, all goverments would become more strict in taxing energy consumption. (Presumably to help save the climate.)
Now at some point there is a market incentive to develop mining techniques that optimize for less energy consumption above all else. This would lead to better technologies and thus environment friendly mining techniques.
So this would mean that two factors in this world have changed. Namely taxation on energy and energy consumption while mining crypto.
But this goes further. What if the usage of crypto enables reduction in carbon imprint in other sectors? This could be a possible development.
And so on. The world is always changing.
That's the insidious thing about PoW, though: it will absorb efficiency improvements by design. If a chip came out tomorrow that halved the amount of energy used per hash, instead of halving the CO2 use of PoW, miners would be incentivized just to double the network hash rate.
Bitcoin mining's main cost is energy usage. It already fully optimises for less energy consumption. But because the way bitcoin is designed, any gains in energy consumption will cause mining difficulty to go up, and with it energy consumption.
Bitcoin is designed to be anti-efficient. All improvement in efficiency of mining are immediately cancelled out by difficulty adjustments. That is the economic model of bitcoin: It will always use as much energy as you can buy with the mining rewards.
There is already a market incentive for that (electricity is not free), and there is already a solution to this (proof of stake). Please stop advocating and using proof of work shitcoins.
The question is whether that will happen before serious consequences of climate change. While I agree that market (as well as government) incentive is likely to optimize these systems for less energy, and cleaner energy in general, humans are lazy all the way through the bell-curve. Because we developed for millions of years in a hostile world with scarce nutrition, we are inclined towards conserving nutrition and calories, thus we are still inclined mentally to be reactive more than proactive.
What I'm saying is that you might very well be right, but I am pessimistic in that I think we may react too late. Our efforts to change our ways have been, for all intents and purposes, a joke for the last 40 years.
> It is based on the wrong assumption of a static universe.
I am glad you bring up this point, although there's a flaw in it.
What I think you are saying is that the universe is full of change that the myopic human brain struggles to comprehend in its short lifetime. This is something I frequently have difficulty communicating to people.
For instance, one of my long time interests is in native plants and foraging. The truth about "native plants" is that little of it approaches a definition that can be considered truly "native". What's native to a person depends on their perspective. Native since when? Since humans showed up? Since before European settlers? Since the Pleistocene? What people think of as native plants are often as recent to an area as the 1400's or were carried by birds and critters from other parts of the world at some point in prehistory.
To your point, the world has always been changing long before we showed up, and attempting to keep it in suspended animation may be a losing game.
But many in the native plant community (yes, there are people simply interested in native flora) won't have that perspective, let alone consider it intellectually. I left those communities because my view that not every non-native plant is "invasive" or "noxious" was considered heresy. Because the world has always been in flux, I generally don't believe that living things introduced in our lifetime must be eradicated to maintain the image of the world we are familiar with. There are of course exceptions, but to many zealots every plant they don't like must be an exception. It doesn't even matter if an introduced plant doesn't pose a threat to surrounding plants and animals. They want it gone because reasons.
In some ways, climate change can be viewed in the same way. While I absolutely think that climate change caused by humanity is an alarming concern, I have trouble discussing the issue with people because they have the "static universe" world view. In their minds, our current Earth is the one that was always meant to exist, which is pretty anthropocentric. They believe that, at least until recently, we had just the right amount of glaciers, just the right amount of snow in the winter, and just the right amount of heat in the summer to melt the snow caps for drinking water and give us a nice tan; it's just as God intended!
The tricky thing about climate change is that a certain amount of it was destined to happen whether we were blowing CO2 into the atmosphere or not. This fact (and it is a fact) doesn't change my view that we should be concerned about the warming of the glove, but it's often ignored by people. They read facts about melting glaciers and simply conclude, based on their limited earthly experience, that glaciers shouldn't melt and that glaciers melting are necessarily a sign of doom. Ironically, some of them are still opposed to nuclear energy or seriously investing in solar technology, but that's neither here nor there.
On the other hand, some use the fluctuating-universe theory to rationalize their lack of concern. To them, all change is what God intended, figuratively speaking. It's the mirror image of the supposed counterargument.
There are solutions that should satisfy both sides of the coin. Will they ever agree to use those solutions proactively? It seems we are at a political impasse where one's position on these issues primarily depends on where their personality and temperament naturally drifts them towards rather by highly conscious choice. (arguments around free-will notwithstanding)
When will this be truly enforced?
I kind of assumed BTC mining was going to be owned by Chinese nationals within a couple years, at which point the government would nationalize it and BTC would no longer, in practice, have the promise of a distributed store of truth.
Egg on my face.
For instance El Salvador made bit-coin legal tender there... So china has out lawed what an other country has declared legal tender... Might make transactions between those 2 countries interesting....
... as is everything else? Other than governments declaring it illegal and intermediaries black listing it, I mean.
Relatedly, can they jam Starlink?
> they are not legal and should not and cannot be used as currency in the market
So, you're not allowed to use it as a currency. Can you still use it as an asset?
Its being hyped as "new" but its not.
Here's the one from 2021: http://www.safe.gov.cn/safe/2021/0924/19911.html
There are changes. E.g. the 2017 announcement doesn't mention 衍生品 (derivatives) at all, while the 2021 announcement explicitly lists trading them among the prohibited activities.
even aside from reducing the amount of financial stupidity in the world, bitcoin uses as much electricity as entire countries! to process 4 TRANSACTIONS PER SECOND:
https://www.blockchain.com/charts/transactions-per-second
what in the ever-loving fuck are we doing with ourselves.
If you think it through, it can't work as only a transactional mechanism, because the price won't be stable. It has to first become a big asset class with a lot of liquidity, which means it has to go through a growth phase, i.e. speculation.
If PoW is still around, but the price dumps low enough that miners are only burning, say, $1,000,000 a year worth of power, that'd be a great improvement.
Panic/optimism/panic/whatever.
There’s nothing behind the price but pure sentiment.
just kidding. I see 'crypto', I think 'cryptography', and China banning cryptography (except for the party/government) doesn't seem that far fetched, so I think its a bad headline.
One example being Algorand which is carbon neutral: https://www.algorand.com/resources/blog/how-algorand-offsets...
Oh and speaking of usage of crypto in China - i wonder how that affects VET / VeChain which is, largely, used by Walmart China to track their wares:
The reason why we have inflation and debt is to keep the value of our currencies stable. IE, if people want to use dollars, the US government can print more dollars to satisfy the demand. (And thus keep the value stable.)
Cryptocurrency's volatile value is a result of its inability to "print money" when more people want to use it.
Remember: Currency is not an investment. A good currency has a stable value over time; otherwise it's very difficult to conduct commerce.
Bailouts are another benefit. Governments can at will dull or even prevent financial contagion thus preventing another Great Depression.
All this has a cost in the form of inflation until the money is reabsorbed of course but it’s better than economic collapse.
Crypto *is* volatile and wasteful compared to any of those.
In fact some countries, e.g. Kosovo and Montenegro, in the Balkans, use the euro as a de facto domestic currency since 2002, even though they have no agreements with the EU.
However, as an investment, as of right now, there is only a span of a few months where if you bought Bitcoin you would not be in the green right now.
There are a lot of different versions of the idea though. A lot of variety exists in crypto now, and very little is deterministic. I don't want to rule out the positive possibilities, and outlawing is broad brush. The PCB grunted at crypto here. We can do
That said, the variety of possibilities also creates danger. Underregulated stable coins, for example, get very sketchy once you reach a certain size. If they keep growing, start embellished with dolaralized interest payments and such.... you now have a rogue banking system issuing its own US dollars. Good luck with that. The scale of fraud, and treacherously borderline fraud can be epic. I don't think we should downplay these.
OTOH, this is true of every part of the financial sector. Lets not pretend the current way the financial sector is structured isn't riddled with the kinds of problems crypto poses.
A country with some clever CB people, even a small one, should be bold and bring crypto into the pax. There's a lot you can do with a designed-4-a-purpose currency, and crypto is a very viable way to do many things. Bitcoin's origins, and much of crypto's present, is secrecy oriented. But, it's actually more natural to design a cryptocurrency for transparency. That's useful in a lot of circumstances.
Take time to understand wtf is going on and regulate, ban or encourage specific things for specific reasons. There's a lot to be gained, not just a lot to be lost. A properly regulated stable coin might be a great idea.
Keynes has made a comeback during the pandemic, and people are relearning war era ideas about controlling inflation. In that context and considering 2021's low interest rates, national savings bonds will probably soon be considered in various places. You don't need crypto to do this, but it does give you more flexibility in how you do it.
I think this isn't emphasized enough. With existing fiat money I have some degree of democratic control over monetary policy. With BTC, critical monetary policy was set by one person and if that monetary policy ever changes it will be decided by a combination of engineers and mining conglomerates.
Given how critical these policies are and how ideologically focused many of the non-speculators are, I am worried about growing systems with disastrous policy consequences.
How exactly do you think you could dethrone Bitcoin, overcoming its gigantic first-mover advantage?
I believe BTC could only come down with the rest of that "economy".
Do you have any resources or studies to describe this more? I have really struggled to find actually nuanced discussions and unbiased sources for this. It’s all at the extremes of it’s either the worst thing ever to not a problem at all.
I’d also be interested in comparisons to energy usage of say servers that run Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, etc.
Additional studies [3] have shown that 39% of bitcoin miners are using renewables.
The energy consumption argument has led some to investigate the energy consumption of other assets such as gold with some estimating the energy requirements for gold to be 50x that of mining bitcoin [4].
Whenever energy consumption of other assets are pointed out to be higher than bitcoin the debate then shifts to utility; e.g it’s ok if Y consumes X energy because Y provides Z to society.
Some bitcoin miners are finding interesting way to utilize the heat produced by their mining equipment [5]. And some say that bitcoin mining can help reduce the cost of producing new green energy infrastructure since excess power that would’ve been wasted could be used for bitcoin mining to offset costs.
I agree with you that it is tough to find unbiased info on the subject.
- [1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/328581842_Bitcoin_e...
- [2] https://cbeci.org/
- [3] https://www.jbs.cam.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/2021-cc...
- [4] https://simon.medium.com/bitcoin-and-pollution-the-definitiv...
- [5] https://braiins.com/blog/green-innovation-in-bitcoin-mining-...
Also, are you suggesting banning all assets whose volatility crosses a certain threshold?
As for energy consumption, does this also apply to Proof of Stake networks?
For those who genuinely want decentralised currency, there's so many more efficient options
Like what, NFTs for farts? Near as I can tell, the other main use cases for crypto - smart contracts, supply chain provenance tracking, and securities settlement processing really haven't panned out. Others have pointed out why it's not working as a currency. Literally all we have left is a vehicle for speculation.
I don't clearly see what you would actually propose banning. My opinion is it's technology, an idea, and that shouldn't be banned.
I find it amusing how casually you just made up a statistic and used it as justification to ban something. Here's an actual statistic: 100% of people who held Bitcoin for longer than 4 years are up on their investment.
edit: Lots of downvotes for an easily verifiable fact. Anyone can look at the BTC chart and see that there is no 4 year span where the price ends up lower than it was at the start.
Just imagine everybody in the world buys as much Bitcoin as they can afford, immediately.
How much richer are we all, in aggregate, at the end of the day?
Millions can be wrong for decades. If history teaches anything is has to be this.
Needless to say that its also technically impossible to ban crypto. Its like banning torrents or even harder and we all know torrent was attacked heavily in the past but it did not go away.
Steel manufacturing requires tons of electricity, and it is already impossible in EU without enormous subsidies. It's an industry surviving entirely on life support.
BTW the chip shortage has nothing todo with mining, but if you believe that lie Nvidia and AMD tells you since 5 years...well then that's to bad.
Just because one crypto currency is like that doesn't mean there cannot be another decentralized crypto currency that is better.
Just because your or mine imagination does not reach there doesn't mean there can't be somebody that can figure it out.
I don't fly in airplanes but I use crypto. So why should you get to choose to do some activities that blast CO2 directly into the atmosphere but I can't? It is a disgusting, authoritarian ideology you have.
Besides that crypto can run on solar. Airplanes cannot. So I propose we ban airplanes. /s
The reality is you just don't like the politics behind the crypto movement. The climate is just a convenient bludgeon for you.
Isn't this whataboutism? A is not so bad because you know, B does it too.
(Save the “it’s not really that bad” arguments, I’ve heard all the industry’s gaslighting, but their claims don’t match reality)
You make money when you exit and sell the asset for cash. Have they sold ?
As to why >100% transparency is a desirable property, see recent regime changes and imagine how easy it would be to persecute the friends of the old regime by simply looking at their purchase history.
Edit:
Why is that interesting? Because popular sentiment (in the comments) on HN is very frequently wrong. HN is a tremendous resource for contrarian purposes.
Every watt of renewable power generated to power a crypto miner, is a watt not being used to reduce the use of non-renewables in the wider energy grid.
I don’t care if your crypto gear is hooked up to a dedicated hydro plant, I care that the hydroplant is not connected to the wider grid and shutting down gas fired power stations.
For keeping track of a ledger that one dude in a basement with an Excel spreadsheet could keep track of, more or less.
Probably because heads of state like to print it to solve their short term problems essentially robbing everyone with an inflation tax. I dont call that stable or just. I work and save and expect my currency to hold up and not be abused which is not happening currently.
Edit: HN must be the worst platform in existence to debate. I have about 700 karma and cant comment more than 3 times on this thread. Your rules are not helping discussion or clearing clutter, they're just really annoying. Retrac: no ive hit a limit and cant respond anymore on the whole thread even with only a few comments.
That's funny. The extant fiat currencies haven't failed. So, the only ones that have failed... are the failed ones. And those have failed, 100%, indeed.
Anyway. There's a cute video out there I can't find now of a man trying to use gold in New York to buy something. Anything. The results indicate its use as a currency was questionable. (No one would accept it as payment.)
I'm curious about what leads you to claim that gold is "a private currency". Can you elaborate on the rationale behind your claim?
I don't agree with the sentiment of the parent either, but:
* Assume the best interpretation of a comment [1].
* Keep it on topic
* Don't attack the person, also not implicitly (e.g. "please educate yourself", don't say that)
Reread: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
One can claim many things about the parent comment. But it's all directed to the topic at hand.
Cheers!
[1] The best interpretation I can come up with is: yes the energy issue with crypto/bitcoin are an actual problem to solve. Yes, using crypto might be a good use-case in certain situations. While I don't believe the profit claim (there's no source), I can't disprove it either. So it poses an interesting question as to whether that's true.
What makes you think that? You do realise that they could easily outlaw 1) miners, 2) exchanges that convert to fiat, and 3) people privately exchanging to fiat, and (domestically) enforce that reasonably well, too.
And sure, there could still be an underground market - you can get still get weed and cocaine in China or Singapore, but I wouldn't recommend participating in it.
2015: https://archive.is/Higoz
2017: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-bitcoin-china-idUSKCN1BJ1...
2018: https://www.businessinsider.com/china-eliminates-all-cryptoc...
2021: https://archive.is/s7nbw
"China Has Banned Bitcoin 13 Times Since 2012":
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/china-great-bitcoin-mining-mi...
Why wouldn't it? Strong central government. Clear economic and social goals with the ends justifying whatever unethical means. A complacent middle and upper class satiated by enough new wealth to make them fat(ter than they used to be) and happy.
Why won't they be the next world power for the foreseeable future? Is there an anti-party faction in China that's larger and more powerful than I see in US media?
Or is this just wishful thinking from the west?
What do you mean by completely control covid? What intended result have they managed to arrive at?
"big thieves hate little thieves"
I wouldn't be surprised if that was the case, but it was just conversation over a beer. Someone else to confirm.
China is trying to prop up domestic stocks and investment. Crypto blunts that effort. Moreover, following or reclaiming the money is difficult, slow, and sometimes impossible. Very bad.
Crypto is probably something that the NSA can headshot and easily kill your cottage industry. Also bad, but to a much lesser degree than the capital flight.
/s
Bsckground There is a severe shortage of gaming GPUs Geforce 30xx. Possibly semi conductor shortage / crypto mining.
I can't read the text and be certain whether it means that transactions in it are prohibited, or that it simply does not have the same status as legal tender, as in currency that companies are required to accept.
5.5%???? for bitcoin it means nothing.
You think the CCP and central bank of China are just putting out statements to help a few foreign traders win on leveraged trades? The central planners of the economy that if fast becoming the largest in the world care a ton about some random traders in other countries? LMAO.
If I was the CCP I'd try to leverage BTC (and others) as a weapon against the dominance of USD.
Instead it looks like they just want to implement their own variant that gives them total control and transparency of in-country transactions. At a minimum they could do both (ban BTC use internally, but still allow mining in the country). I must be missing something.
Their authoritarian currency does allow for some interesting things like expiring credits or instant distribution of benefits, refunds, stimulus to the public (with constraints baked in) - but the obvious negatives are pretty extreme especially with the CCP's track record.
I'm sick and tired of everything being a narrative manipulation op.
Even pure tech work that just happens to have been done by Bitcoin related folks tends to get downvoted and flagged, e.g.
Crypto is one of several things which are going to carry things through to the new order. (Avatar embodiment and pseudonymous identity is another, and DAOs taking the place of traditional startups is another.) A lot of people here are going to be left confused and angry, but that's the nature of change: the innovators of the past boil slowly into being stuck in their ways and unable to adapt.