Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

China orders Bitcoin exchanges in capital city to close

bbc.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 233 posts

Re: China orders Bitcoin exchanges in capital city to close

#141

Post by tboyd47 »

tannerbrockwell wrote: post #133
tboyd47 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are still thinking about this in terms of a physical object. Miners don't "produce" anything except in the same sense that I "produce" the answer to a crossword puzzle. You can take away my pencil but it doesn't make the puzzle unsolvable.

Dude. The mining rigs are physical. All I said was that China will seize the 'means of production' so they control the manufacture domestically. It's a phrase that was used a lot to describe the basic tenets of different types of economy and harkens to a time when industrialization was a major focus of the first world and people trying to find their place in an industrial society. The "means of production" phrase has…

Yep, thanks, I'm aware of the history of the term.

Think back to what I said about crossword puzzles. If China had a world-class crossword puzzle team, winning every competition, why on earth would they seize their own team's pencils? It wouldn't stop the competitions from happening, and it wouldn't stop other teams from winning them.

I'm not trying to be a pedantic prick on the internet, so please excuse me if I'm coming off that way, but I enjoy this topic a lot, probably too much.

Re: China orders Bitcoin exchanges in capital city to close

#142

Post by pja »

baddox wrote: post #108
pja wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) Shorting into a bubble is usually a terrible idea. 2) The only realistic way to short BTC is to do so via a very small list of exchanges. Even if you trust them (which, given the history of cryptocurrency exchanges is hardly a given) the borrow cost is huge: there's no way you could reasonably make this kind of macro BTC bet. The combination of these two realities makes the "If you don't believe the price, you oug…

Then at the bare minimum make some falsifiable prediction, like "a bitcoin will be worth less than 1,000 USD 24 months from today." If someone insists that shorting is infeasible, and refuses to make a clear prediction, then their claim is unfalsifiable and thus fairly meaningless.

Timing bubbles collapses is notoriously difficult.

(In my personal opinion: It's like asking when the next collapse in a sandpile will happen & how big it will be. Not possible.)

Re: China orders Bitcoin exchanges in capital city to close

#143

Post by xamuel »

mywittyname wrote: post #76
Akujin wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My "buy in" was a $300 AMD graphics card which I then kept using for games after the mining difficulty was too high. As far as I'm concerned my BTC is an added value. If it crashes to worthlessness I would not care. PS: I have no intention of cashing out. Since BTC is deflationary I'd rather hold till each BTC is worth 100k. Check this thread in 2030 :)

Deflationary does not imply an ever-increasing value. At some point, deflationary commodities will be so rare as to be useless. Lack of supply leads to a lack of velocity, which leads to a lack of liquidity. Once that happens, people will move to a competing product. Imagine if soy beans gradually went extinct. In the short-term, the prices would spike as companies reliant on soy beans compete for the shrinking suppl…

1btc is actually equal to 100,000,000 satoshi, and if it ever gets to a point where that's not enough supply, people can just split satoshis further.

Re: China orders Bitcoin exchanges in capital city to close

#144

Post by mywittyname »

_muff1nman_ wrote: post #88
mywittyname wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Deflationary does not imply an ever-increasing value. At some point, deflationary commodities will be so rare as to be useless. Lack of supply leads to a lack of velocity, which leads to a lack of liquidity. Once that happens, people will move to a competing product. Imagine if soy beans gradually went extinct. In the short-term, the prices would spike as companies reliant on soy beans compete for the shrinking suppl…

> Lack of supply leads to a lack of velocity, which leads to a lack of liquidity How does one define supply with a divisible unit like bitcoin? Arguably, supply does not diminish, rather people use smaller units of bitcoins.

Well, it's totally possible to lose a btc irrecoverably.

Secondly, at some point, calculations become onerous. Like, if btc is $100k/coin, then normal, every day transactions will need to be in 0.000001 coins. Which is an incredibly annoying unit to work with, it's trivially easy to miss an order of magnitude, i.e., 0.0000001 at a glance, is that a dime, a dollar, or a ten?

Accidentally give a $100 instead of $10 once, and you'll be annoyed, do it twice and you're done using btc.

Re: China orders Bitcoin exchanges in capital city to close

#145

Post by TearsInTheRain »

schintan wrote: post #107
tannerbrockwell wrote: post #22

China will nationalize the domestic miners and treat Bitcoin as a commodity asset that the state controls. I believe this will immediately cause a constriction in supply as those coins will not be sold at least initially on the open market. Look for this messaging to coincide with the pronouncements around the new five-year plan(FYP)[1]. As the first major section of the 13th FYP, innovation is emphasized as a corner…

If China is able to do it, wouldn't Bitcoin lose all its value ?

China can exert a lot of control on it's business regarding bitcoin but they wouldnt be able to control or censor the network so this wouldnt kill bitcoin.

Re: China orders Bitcoin exchanges in capital city to close

#146

Post by tboyd47 »

neya wrote: post #140

I have a different technological perspective on this. Having traveled and lived in Asian, Chinese-majority cities/countries, this is a typical Chinese govt. move. In China, WeChat is a dominant player (by Tencent), a LOT of the transactions in China happen through WeChat, which offers seamless payments integration. The penetration is so strong that even poor, road-side sellers accept money through WeChat. Almost ever…

Interesting - but isn't Bitcoin more of a protocol and WeChat more of an application? Couldn't WeChat offer Bitcoin payments?

Re: China orders Bitcoin exchanges in capital city to close

#147

Post by throwaway613834 »

dreen wrote: post #18
cs702 wrote: post #15

As soon as I read this, two words came to mind: Capital flight. A growing number of Chinese nationals has been using Bitcoin to siphon money out of China over the past several years.[1][2] Not surprisingly, the Chinese government is cracking down on this innovative form of capital flight. [1] http://www.theepochtimes.com/n3/1891021-how-chinese-use-bitc... [2] http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/markets/chinese-i…

I used it to transfer money between countries with an exchange rate better than any other available. Surely this is not illegal?

This is a great example of something that just boggles my mind. With all the regulation out there (on financial stuff in this case), how do people naturally come to the conclusion that such a scheme bypassing them is not illegal? (genuine question; not disparaging you)

Re: China orders Bitcoin exchanges in capital city to close

#149

Post by tboyd47 »

DINKDINK wrote: post #126
schintan wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If China is able to do it, wouldn't Bitcoin lose all its value ?

No. Miners can only double spend transactions if they have > 50 % of the hash rate. The only purpose of miners is to add proof of work to in exchange for new coins that users value. If the proof of work is on a chain that contains valid transactions and conforms to consensus rules, it'll be valuable.

But that would just create an invalid side chain and result in all the miners' hash power being wasted.

https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/55316/what-happe...

Re: China orders Bitcoin exchanges in capital city to close

#150

Post by LeoPanthera »

neya wrote: post #140

I have a different technological perspective on this. Having traveled and lived in Asian, Chinese-majority cities/countries, this is a typical Chinese govt. move. In China, WeChat is a dominant player (by Tencent), a LOT of the transactions in China happen through WeChat, which offers seamless payments integration. The penetration is so strong that even poor, road-side sellers accept money through WeChat. Almost ever…

Presumably you meant to type "Twitter" there, which Weibo clones.
Post reply on HN