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China Bans Bitcoin Executives from Leaving Country, Miners “Preparing for Worst”

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Re: China Bans Bitcoin Executives from Leaving Country, Miners “Preparing for Worst”

#141

Post by yorwba »

Synaesthesia wrote: post #133
canoebuilder wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>had Hawaii declaring independence, and various states trying to separate either to go completely independent or join Mexico or Canada. And now of imagine that a coalition of China, Russia, Iran and other unfriendly nations were constantly posturing towards an invasion of Mexico Can you map these metaphors to their counterparts in China?

I believe it’s the western states which are in rebellion, which have significant Muslim populations. North Korea is being threatened with invasion and China is encircled by US allies and military bases.

I wouldn't call the situation in Xinjiang or Tibet a rebellion. There are independence movements of some importance, but AFAIK the majority population in both regions are Han Chinese by now, who have much less reason for separatism.

A comparable situation for the US might be native Hawaiians campaigning for independence, while the majority population just doesn't care. There are probably such groups already, they just haven't resorted to violence enough/encountered a strong enough reaction by the state to become notorious.

Re: China Bans Bitcoin Executives from Leaving Country, Miners “Preparing for Worst”

#142

Post by lifeisstillgood »

rblatz wrote: post #90
WhoIsSatoshi wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you buy the bitcoins without the state tracking you? FYI the US is doing that also, you cannot buy on coinbase without providing ID... they want to be able to track big buyers.

You could mine, even if it was unprofitable. Spending 10 million in mining costs to produce $5million in bitcoin is still a win for a lot of people trying to move money out of China.

Does that work - I think the mining reward is 25 BTC, about 75,000 USD. So for 7.5million thats being the winning miner 100 times.

I honestly don't know what setup it takes to be reasonably certain to be the winning miner these days - does anyone have stats on how many miners and how often one might be expected to "win"?

Re: China Bans Bitcoin Executives from Leaving Country, Miners “Preparing for Worst”

#143

Post by [deleted] »

pgodzin wrote: post #30
adamnemecek wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would it? The govt let's you go to casino, I should be allowed to do what I want with my money. Totalitarian and Aldo totalitarian govts are scared of bitcoin.

Governments can trace the money you win and lose at a casino.

[deleted]

Re: China Bans Bitcoin Executives from Leaving Country, Miners “Preparing for Worst”

#144

Post by AlexCoventry »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #137
AlexCoventry wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's all sovereign debt, denominated in a token they can create at will. It's not like a household with an out of control credit card habit.

Sure. But it still can't grow forever without dragging down the real economy, at some point soon growth has to stop, and then what?

From the PRC's perspective, the yuan is a just a tool to stimulate productive activity in their population towards the goals expressed in state budgets. If they can muster the political will, they can simply levy highly progressive taxes to reduce inflation and keep on spending. There is nothing stopping them, ideologically.

Re: China Bans Bitcoin Executives from Leaving Country, Miners “Preparing for Worst”

#145

Post by nikcub »

gggdvnkhmbgjvbn wrote: post #5

All comments so far have been pro-bitcoin... does nobody think this could actually be a sensible decision?

If you follow Bitcoin politics you'd know that there is a large population of Bitcoin users who like this decision[0][3][4].

There is an upcoming contentious hard fork in Bitcoin called Segwit2x. It activates in November and is supported by some miners and a number of Bitcoin companies. Those who oppose that hard fork believe cutting China out of the network will cause the proposal to fail.

Segwit2x was a compromise between Bitcoin providers and the very miners that China look like shutting down now - primarily Bitmain, who many believe are also behind, or in control of, the previous bcash bitcoin fork. The compromise was activating Segwit in exchange for miners getting their wish of a 2MB block size increase. Segwit has since been force-activated with a user-activated soft fork - so many feel the compromise is now not necessary and presents many risks.

[0] https://twitter.com/stefanobernardi/status/91023339225132646...

[1] https://bitcoincore.org/en/2016/01/26/segwit-benefits/

[2] https://github.com/OPUASF/UASF

Re: China Bans Bitcoin Executives from Leaving Country, Miners “Preparing for Worst”

#146

Post by fapjacks »

indubitable wrote: post #68
mincon4747 wrote: post #3

China's fast descent into totalitarianism is fascinating and scary. One can easily replace 'bitcoin executives' with 'foreign executives' or 'foreign assets' and see where this is going. I wonder if those companies that choose to outsource all the jobs in their country to China realized what they've done.

I think people tend to gloss over the fact that China has a population of more than 1.4 billion people in a land area that's slightly smaller than the US, multiple territories in outright revolt, ongoing territorial conflict, some cities that are approaching inhospitability due to environmental damage, and our increasingly aggressive nation is something less than friendly with them. I think one thing causing the appa…

I'm telling you right now... Let there be no illusion that Hawaii would or could ever declare independence from the mainland. Hawaiians wanting independence are a tiny minority, and even they realize that the residents of Hawaii have basically a three-way choice: The United States, Russia, or China. Hawaii is far too liberal and American and really everyone underestimates how much American military force is there on those islands. It ain't going anywhere without a fight that almost no one else can win.

Re: China Bans Bitcoin Executives from Leaving Country, Miners “Preparing for Worst”

#147

Post by Heliosmaster »

huehehue wrote: post #54
acjohnson55 wrote: post #21

What's interesting to me is that no amount of bad news appears to affect the price of BTC. I'm not a professional or amateur trader (I've got no position on BTC at all) but the price fluctuations really seem dominated by sentiment over any sort of fundamentals.

Trends have been more or less identical for Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Litecoin over the past month or so. The following picture only spans a week, but it shows the exact same rise and fall in prices for all 3 -- https://i.imgur.com/GjsCMUZ.png . Trying to fit models to that picture (or the other way around) seems like trouble, but it stuck out as interesting.

I think that when bitcoin takes a hit it propagates to all other cryptocurrencies, since BTCs are often seen as an archetype of all cryptomoney.

Re: China Bans Bitcoin Executives from Leaving Country, Miners “Preparing for Worst”

#148

Post by Heliosmaster »

thisisit wrote: post #136
Twisell wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure? Doesn't the need to mine block slow down transaction to a bare maximum per block? And if miners in china close operations won't time between block increase? Thus maybe BTC is actually responding slower than other market... what do you think? I'm by far not a keychain expert so I will gladly be corrected if I'm wrong.

Bitcoin adjusts block generation to 10 minutes irrespective of the miners. What does change is difficulty, hashrate and transaction fees. The bitcoin hashrate has remained more or less the same in last 2 months: https://blockchain.info/charts/hash-rate?timespan=60days This is in contrast with last 3 months where the hashrate nearly doubled: https://blockchain.info/charts/hash-rate?timespan=180days Fees peaked around…

Hashrate has not remained constant:

- 7 day avg of last 3 mo: https://blockchain.info/charts/hash-rate?timespan=180days&da...

- 7 day avg of last 2 mo: https://blockchain.info/charts/hash-rate?timespan=30days&day...

Going from 6 to 7.5 EH/s it's not more or less the same (it's a 25% increase)

Re: China Bans Bitcoin Executives from Leaving Country, Miners “Preparing for Worst”

#149

Post by fapjacks »

yorwba wrote: post #141
Synaesthesia wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe it’s the western states which are in rebellion, which have significant Muslim populations. North Korea is being threatened with invasion and China is encircled by US allies and military bases.

I wouldn't call the situation in Xinjiang or Tibet a rebellion. There are independence movements of some importance, but AFAIK the majority population in both regions are Han Chinese by now, who have much less reason for separatism. A comparable situation for the US might be native Hawaiians campaigning for independence, while the majority population just doesn't care. There are probably such groups already, they jus…

You are really overestimating the substance of the native Hawaiian independence movement. The vast vast majority of people living in Hawaii are not even native Hawaiian to begin with. And even most local Hawaiians don't want independence from the United States. It is really a tiny minority offshoot with some specific political grievances. Independence isn't even seriously floated by the majority of these independence folks. The whole idea is just a political and marketing tool except to a very small group of people.

Re: China Bans Bitcoin Executives from Leaving Country, Miners “Preparing for Worst”

#150

Post by B1FF_PSUVM »

est wrote: post #25
dilap wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

honest question, hasn't it been totalitarian for like the past 70 years?

More like 2000 years of totalitarian.

If you mix up monarchy, empire, dictatorship, etc. all in the same bucket and call everything 'totalitarian', our ability to think about politics gets rather reduced.

It's even anachronistic, the concept itself is recent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Totalitarianism

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