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China Cracks Down On Bitcoin, Cuts Off Exchanges' Bank Access
jfruh (300774) writes "Bitcoin has made many governments and regulators uncomfortable, and the Chinese government is responding to the challenge it poses with its usual lack of subtlety. Two Chinese bitcoin exchanges have found themselves cut off from the money economy, as Chinese banks, under pressure from the government, refuse to do business with them."
with the idea of someone else cutting in on their currency manipulation business. Yuan? You can't have.
Anyone keeping coins in an exchange for any longer than necessary to exchange them is an idiot.
the BiteCon folks wanted to be rebels. let 'em.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
So the 2nd largest economy is taking steps to ban BitCoin? Really...
Can the end be too far away?
Get back in there at once and sell, sell!!
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Bitcoin is more traceable than cash. The bitcoin chain contains a record of every bitcoin transaction ever made, anywhere. There are some randomizing anonymizer services which take money from lots of people and return it randomly so nobody knows exactly which amount came from which source, but that kind of services exists for other currencies as well.
But they were also bullish when it was $900. Maybe it'll get back up there, maybe it'll die. Who knows?
Is 1563649 a prime number?
So... sort of a money laundromat?
But you can never tell me the identity of a miner. (Well, the NSA probably could.)
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
Yep. Because a secure worldwide ledger that can send large amounts of money anywhere in the world for free can be the basis of many a killer app. And once that killer app hits, the price will rocket through the stratosphere. Or it could never come, and then I will lose what I can afford to.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
Sort of a casino
( but without all the entertainment perks and less of the gambling )
Well, this is it -- an early test of whether Bitcoin can stand on its own as an underground currency. The crutch of traditional currency exchange has been kicked out from under it. Will the bitcoins currently in China be abandoned? smuggled out? or actually used as money like Satoshi intended?
Bitcoin transactions will not be free in the long term. Once all the bit coins are mined, the people verifying the transactions will have to charge a fee unless they are using a bot net.
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
Dont have to, because the miner will die of old age before they get any significant bitcoin amounts now.
Maybe 3 years ago you could mine and make money, not anymore.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The CEO of Bitcoin has already decided to ban China as a countermeasure. So who's the fool now?
I see a different possible reason for this than "bad totalitarian government gets scared of loss of control", but my sample size is small so I may be very wrong here. I know some Chinese citizens and they are unusually interested in the stock market and money making schemes. They don't really understand even a little bit how the stock market works, yet they remain convinced that it's easy to invest a pittance and come out rich. It may be simply that the government is tired of dealing with citizens who don't have even the faintest understanding of how markets work and they don't want to see a bunch of dummies investing their life savings into bitcoin and maybe going bust because I guarantee you that if that happens, the same people who lost their money would demand that the government make them whole.
Sure. When people are spending all their money building fake malls and fake cities, that's "totally working".
"Totally working" is undervaluing their currency so that all goods and services that they offer to the US have an inherent built-in 30% discount.
Its not really the low wages that make manufacturing so attractive in China, its this 30% discount on *everything* compared to domestic US manufacture.
If the Chinese government had been unsubtle, the police would have arrested the owners and they'd be doing hard labour in a punishment camp in Tibet right now. Telling banks to stop doing business with them is a very very moderate slap on the wrist for people who've been slightly naughty.
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
Credit card.
BitCoins are tracable forever. Those block chains never disappear. However, if one possesses a bunch of tainted coins in a wallet, and hands the wallet to someone else, in exchange for some other commodity, that can effectively hide where the coins came from.
To be fair, $450 per coin is about... $449.50 more than I ever thought they would be. It'll be interesting to see what happens when the hype dies down and the speculation starts to dry up. Until then I'll watch from the sidelines, happy enough even if I could have bought in when it was pennies per coin.
Yes, as I understand it, the whole point is that BTC are meant to be spent on goods/services, and the recipients can then spend their BTC on the goods/services they need, and so on, without the need to ever convert to or from other currencies except maybe to pay local taxes. In such a world, the exchanges become far less important.
But I don't think we're at the point yet where a community of people buy groceries, gasoline, pay rent and utilities, etc. purely by using BTC. And if the exchanges can't be trusted, the BTC user base may start to degrade to much smaller population of speculators, hoarders, and true believers waiting for a change in the technological or political winds.
At which point you basically have the Flainian Pobble Beads from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which are only exchangeable for other Flainian Pobble Beads...
Koans and fables for the software engineer
At least the Chinese gov't does not have to worry about its people liking to gamble....
There will be transaction fees. Because of what jeremyp said. Also, it is only a minscule slice of the people on this planet who can dare touch more than pocket change worth of bitcoin, without the benefits of some kind of insurance. Exchanges will step in and be part of that solution, eventually, once they are stable and respected enough to be backed by real money. So that "large amounts of money anywhere in the world for free" is never going to happen, in any important sense.
Bitcoin and similar have a shot at competing with credit cards. The real question is how much lower the fees be than 3%, once all kinds of overhead are factored in. Thinking in terms of zero costs is just a fantasy. Luckily for the bitcoin aficionados, the bar for success if not nearly so high. They do not have to achieve zero fees in order to be a big success.
Bitcoin is about as important as the Segway. Bitcoin works, and it does what it's supposed to do - allow one-way irrevocable value transfers between anonymous parties. That's a poor basis for practical commerce, although a boon to a broad range of crooks. It's especially bad that over half of Bitcoin exchanges have gone bust, despite the fact that they shouldn't be at financial risk.
It looks like Bitcoin will be around for a while, but it's not growing. The block chain transaction rate now is about what it was a year ago. Like the Segway, Bitcoin is kind of cool, and has niche applications, but it's not changing the world.
Once all the bit coins are mined, the people verifying the transactions will have to charge a fee unless they are using a bot net.
A number of pools are already requiring fees to include transactions, OR including only a limited number of free transactions.
The thing is... if there's no fee... then there's no incentive for a miner to include the transaction. There is no minimum number of transactions for a miner to include ----- a block with no transactions is valid -- if a miner wants, and they can find a block with no transactions in it --- then the miner can claim the reward.
So expect fees to be mandatory sooner than you think.
Communist economies are fake economies.
And just as often, Capitalist economies are as well.
Because Asset Backed Paper Commodities were basically a giant Ponzi scheme where garbage debt was laundered and passed off to other suckers by the very banks who gave out credit like it was candy.
Your example does NOT fit the "Capitalism" moniker.
True Capiltalism abhors ponzi schemes.
True Capitalism does not create money out of thin air.
True Capitalism does not engage in Quantitative Easing.
What America practices is very far from True Capitalism.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
From Nigeria?
I would venture that the bitcoins will be easier to trace and find than the dollars/yens/whatevers. They may be in some unidentifiable wallet, but as soon as someone uses them to buy something, those bitcoins can be traced back to the illegal transactions. They may have used all kinds of trickery to disguise the transfers, but that's actually harder to do with bitcoins than with cash.
Yes, you might make a list of all bills, where they were last spent, and try to make a pattern out of that to find the bad guy. Indeed, this technique often succeeds. But compare that to "bills" that have a record on them of every transaction ever made with them. Wouldn't you agree that that is more traceable? I never said cash is completely untraceable, I'm just saying it's wrong to say that bitcoin is untraceable when in fact it is much easier to trace than cash. I'm sure the NSA absolutely loves bitcoin.
And then that person gets arrested and tells the police where he got the coins from.
The bank has issued no decision and will not make a decision until April 15th. Although it is highly speculated that the outcome will remain true, it is still.....speculation.