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Bitcoin In China Still Chugging Along, a Year After Clampdown
angry tapir writes A year after China began tightening regulations around Bitcoin, the virtual currency is still thriving in the country, albeit on the fringes, according to its largest exchange. Bitcoin prices may have declined, but Chinese buyers are still trading the currency in high volumes with the help of BTC China, an exchange that witnessed the boom days back in 2013, only to see the bust following the Chinese government's announcement, in December of that year, that banks would be banned from trading in bitcoin.
Unless the Bitcoin protocol is broken, Bitcoin will always have value. Bitcoin is a finite resource. The value will be determined by the marketplace.
There are other alternative virtual currencies just like there are other alternative network protocols. However, as with almost any technology, the first widely-accepted implementation becomes the standard. TCP/IP is far from the best network protocol - but it is good enough. Bitcoin is far from the best virtual currency - but it is the most widely accepted.
I think it's fairly stupid at this point not to have a small amount of Bitcoin just in case it really starts to be accepted.
--- We need more Ron Paul!
How does that make any sense? You're not suddenly going to be unable to buy things with real money.
It's a gamble that bitcoin goes up in value, not that real money will become worthless.
Even if bitcoin becomes successful, fiat money isn't going to be replaced.
I know that it's popular to believe that China just wants to stop Bitcoin because it can't control it and while that may be part of the reasoning behind their actions, there are possibly other reasons as well. My last 2 girlfriends were Chinese and I mean "born and raised in China". In China as the stock market is fairly new thing and the general population doesn't understand it very well, there are a lot of misconceptions about how it works. I had issues with money with both of them, although slightly different issues with each. The 2nd one had this belief I couldn't ever correct that everybody can get rich by simply buying the correct stocks and she didn't understand why I wasn't a millionaire or how it was even possible to not make tons of money on every stock available. The first one didn't understand anything about the stock market so that wasn't specifically an issue, but what ended up being an issue was a huge disconnect between her lifestyle expectations and the reality of my salary should we get married. She dumped me and went looking for someone with a lot more in the bank. The reason I bring this up is that my experience is that people in China just assume they can get rich without doing any kind of work to reach that goal. Just buy the right stocks and you'll be rich. If it was that easy, believe me, everybody would be doing that. Or "Why aren't you saving 100% of your salary?" from the first one. I think some of this may be that the government is trying to protect its citizens from themselves so they don't have to deal with massive Bitcoin ripoffs and scams that will inevitably result from an uneducated public buying them thinking that in a year or two they're all going to be rich.
Bicoin is a distributed double-entry bookkeeping ledger where transactions need to be signed by the crediting account's (secret) key. And Bitcoin is also the (imaginary) currency unit used in said ledger.
Seriously, there's nothing there anyone who knows even the basics of accounting wouldn't recognize. It's just wrapped in a high-tech packaging.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.