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China orders Bitcoin exchanges in capital city to close

bbc.co.uk

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Re: China orders Bitcoin exchanges in capital city to close

#161

Post by tboyd47 »

tannerbrockwell wrote: post #154
tboyd47 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

Because it is the most efficient way to build a reserve of a limited commodity (bitcoin) that has a much longer exponential curve to expand along. Currently, the Chinese miners are operating as a business to squeeze a margin out of the discounted electricity available in China. It is in China's interests to treat this as a national resource wherein it is produced domestically. My thesis is NOT that they want to contr…

Thanks for explaining! I finally understand what you were saying and it actually makes a lot of sense.

Re: China orders Bitcoin exchanges in capital city to close

#162

Post by DINKDINK »

namelost wrote: post #135
DINKDINK wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Bitcoin is not the only game in town, there would be a mad scramble to Ethereum et al.

I prefer a blockchain that is immutable, has controlled inflation.

Bitcoin users can always choose a different PoW algorithm if a threat actor coerces too high of a percentage of SHA256 mining equipment

Re: China orders Bitcoin exchanges in capital city to close

#163

Post by csomar »

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…

I highly doubt that. First, bitcoin can be used through "wechat". Second, bitcoin can't handle what wechat is doing: It is volatile, expensive to transact with and slow.

My guess is the simplest thing: China only wants things that can yield its' control over.

Re: China orders Bitcoin exchanges in capital city to close

#164

Post by hyh1048576 »

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…

I don't think this is to protect WeChat.

But speaking of this, it's really interesting to witness many Chinese bitcoin users/traders start to abandon WeChat and switch to Telegram. Many of them are totally new to telegram, but fear of Gov-monitoring drive them there.

See also https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-15/china-s-w...

Re: China orders Bitcoin exchanges in capital city to close

#165

Post by eosrei »

mywittyname wrote: post #144
_muff1nman_ wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 onc…

mBTC: MilliBitcoin - 1 thousandth of a BTC uBTC: MicroBitcoin - 1 millionth of a BTC

Further details: http://bitcoinchaser.com/bitcoin-units-and-denominations

Re: China orders Bitcoin exchanges in capital city to close

#166

Post by gph »

throwaway613834 wrote: post #147
dreen wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Well that is sort of a common law view of things. But most countries practice case law, which means if somethings not explicitly illegal then it must be legal. So I don't think circumventing the law is seen the same way as it would over in the anglosphere, where we'd condemn someone for intentionally not following the 'spirit of the law' and a judge/jury might convict them anyways.

Disclaimer: IANAL and perhaps a bad judge of how people around the world view the law.

Re: China orders Bitcoin exchanges in capital city to close

#167

Post by derenrich »

nikcub wrote: post #129
antonislav wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you expand on point 1? Or maybe point to some references?

If you're reading a story a week about x being in a bubble, then by definition it isn't a bubble

That is not in the definition of a bubble. Nor does it preclude there being a bubble.

Re: China orders Bitcoin exchanges in capital city to close

#168

Post by throwaway613834 »

gph wrote: post #166
throwaway613834 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Well that is sort of a common law view of things. But most countries practice case law, which means if somethings not explicitly illegal then it must be legal. So I don't think circumventing the law is seen the same way as it would over in the anglosphere, where we'd condemn someone for intentionally not following the 'spirit of the law' and a judge/jury might convict them anyways. Disclaimer: IANAL and perhaps a bad…

> Well that is sort of a common law view of things. But most countries practice case law

Aren't these the same thing? [1] Do you mean something else (civil law)?

But that's a great point; maybe the problem is my lack of living in a purely civil law country. The thing is though, it seems more like common sense to me than a legal issue. Like for example, if (say) murder with a knife and a gun had been illegal, but there was no law against using baseball bats, then suddenly everyone in a civil law system would naturally assume using baseball bats to kill would be okay? It just doesn't make sense to me that "whatever is not expressly illegal must be legal", whatever the legal system... but maybe you're saying that would actually stand up in a civil-law court, and people would actually be okay with it?

It's also quite counter-intuitive to me since the US (with its common law) seems to be quite prominent in its tendency to let its people and companies stick to the letter of the law but not its intent. e.g. so many corporations find legal loopholes to take advantage of all sorts of people (from consumers to politicians) by means which are not technically expressly illegal but which almost surely are out of line with the spirits of many existing laws.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_law

Re: China orders Bitcoin exchanges in capital city to close

#169

Post by sushid »

occamrazor wrote: post #93
dreen wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Forex commissions are lower than 1%. Which exchanges offer better rates on a fiat/bitcoin/fiat transfer?

Kraken is ~.26% for a taker and ~.16% for a maker. And in some places, you have to jump through a lot of hoops to send money.

Re: China orders Bitcoin exchanges in capital city to close

#170

Post by lawn »

solotronics wrote: post #122
lordnacho wrote: post #28

You gotta wonder if they will go after the miners. I suppose other cryptos have dealt with this issue, and one with the right properties will emerge, but BTC requires huge warehouses full of computers to mine, so the decentralisation part of the argument is a bit flawed. And the big miners happen to be in China, which is pretty convenient for the government. Not sure exactly how much of capacity is in the country, bu…

the core dev team for BTC already said they are prepared to either emergency adjust difficulty or change the hashing algo if a disaster happens with the miners .. yes this is technically a hard fork of the block chain but it has happened before in an emergency

Well the core dev team already classifies the miners as attacking the network when they don't vote for them and chooses another fork. I would take what they say with a huge grain of salt.
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