Hacker News Reader

Comment by astrodust | Hacker News Reader

Why not just buy Bitcoin directly? There's no requirement to mine these things in the first place if all you want to do is exchange them.

Someone could fly in via Hong Kong with a piece of paper that could unlock $100MM of BTC and nobody would know.

Meanwhile building a gigantic BTC mining facility will not go unnoticed.

View on HN

You can only do that if you find a person with bitcoins that wants to exchange then for yuan located in China.

Not an impossible scenario, but it might not be the most reliable.

Because the local currency would have to go trough the banking systems and if the seller's account is in any other country, then exchange restrictions are applied just the same.

They have paper money, which you can exchange for BTC. Money exchangers have been doing this for centuries with different commodities to skirt around regulations, and BTC, gold, or jade figurines are all the same at the end of the day if there's an agreed value for them.

Well, yes.. but the person giving you paper money in exchange for BTC will make their own exchange rate based on the capital risk incurred in transacting volatile goods, which is very different than transacting gold or jade figurines. Unless of course you meet a BTC collector who has no immediate plans on capitalizing on his investment.

You can do that with US Dollars. It's more complicated with Chinese Yuan.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com