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China Bans Companies From Raising Money Through ICOs (cnbc.com)
Regulators are about to begin scrutinizing China's initial coin offerings -- an industry worth hundreds of millions of dollars. From a report: Local outlet Caixin reported that a notice, issued by a working committee that oversees risk in the country's internet finance sector, said new projects raising cash or other virtual currencies through cryptocurrencies will be banned. It added that authorities will crack down on related fraudulent practices. The document defined initial coin offerings (ICOs) as an unauthorized fundraising tool that may involve financial scams, the Caixin report noted. The committee provided a list of 60 major ICO platforms for local financial regulatory bodies to inspect. Seven government administrations including the People's Bank of China, China Securities Regulatory Commission, China Banking Regulatory Commission and China Insurance Regulatory Commission issued a joint statement where they reiterated that ICOs are unauthorized illegal fund raising activity. The statement said authorities are banning all organizations and individuals from raising funds through ICO activities and that all banks and financial institutions should not do any business related to ICO trading.
That's 40b that never existed in the first place. When you inflate a balloon, it looks like there is a lot, but essentially, all you have is a thin layer of rubber that you started with.
And when it busts you don't even have anything in your hand to show for your effort. In other words, jacking off is more productive.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
All this means is people can't hide their money from the government. The government is making all CC illegal for the most part. They will allow CC in the future but only ones that they approve. So as of right now having a CC is extremely risky for people in China so people are dumping them as quickly as possible so they can have actual cash instead of a piece of digital code that will not be usable to them and might get them arrested.
When a company goes public, it sells shares in the company to raise money; investors by equity, hoping that they'll get to reap the rewards of owning part of a successful company. These shares are sold as part of what's called an IPO (initial public offering).
An ICO (initial coin offering) is a similar concept, but far more general and interesting; rather than buying shares, an investor buys cryptographic tokens (called "coins") that represent some kind of ownership of (or affiliation with) the endeavor.
Because these tokens are just cryptocurrencies (perhaps built on top of the Bitcoin system itself), they are far more interesting than regular shares; they can be traded and split and exchanged in fractions of a coin—there's no need to deal in terms of one "share" at a time; you could sell 0.1234 coin, for example, and can make that deal 24/7, even on holidays. Moreover, cryptocurrency systems have built-in programming languages that can be used to control transactions in very intricate ways; essentially, you can control these tokens with "contracts" that are specified with the precision of a programming language—this is why people call cryptocurrencies programmable money. Furthermore, unlike shares, you can control the coins you buy completely; you can choose to keep them under the control of a third-party (such as a "brokerage" exchange), or you can choose to store them in any way that you choose, such as on a thumb drive that you keep around your neck, or split among several people, or cut up cryptographically and buried across the cyber-and-or-physical landscape like Horcruxes. It's all just data, and the possibilities are therefore endless.
It doesn't matter what China does; they cannot control it.
Oh yes, people will go to jail, but the Organism that is the cryptocurrency economy will learn and adjust through that age-old process, evolution by variation and selection. Even if real-world, public-facing endeavors are shut down, that won't stop virtual endeavors on the Internet; that won't stop people in China from making investments in endeavors in Europe, or anywhere else, and reaping their rewards secretly. Fuck You, authoritarians; the libertarians don't care about your rules anymore.
An ICO (initial coin offering) is a similar concept, but far more general and interesting; rather than buying shares, an investor buys cryptographic tokens (called "coins") that represent some kind of ownership of (or affiliation with) the endeavor. Because these tokens are just cryptocurrencies (perhaps built on top of the Bitcoin system itself), they are far more interesting than regular shares.
Nice analysis, but your use of the word "interesting" is interesting.
What is interesting about people investing in ICOs is that they get nothing real for their money. They are investing in something that they hope will be valuable for no other reason than that other people think it's valuable. This is the very definition of a bubble; they could be investing in beanie babies or tulip bulbs or collectable cards.
You just made that up out of whole cloth. The Chinese people don't trust their fiat. They are trying anyway to convert their cash into anything that they can use to take currency out of the country.
You are 100% correct. As the spouse of a Chinese national, and a person who has spent a LOT of time (full time) living in China, you are 100% correct. Wealthy Chinese want their money out of China, it's heavily manipulated and controlled, and China is finally cracking down on tax evasion (which is rampant in China).
And you are also completely wrong. Wealthy Chinese want their money out of China - but they also really do NOT want to end up in a Chinese prison or executed (yes, high amounts of tax fraud can receive a death penalty). So they tend to use legal vehicles only, including investments in actual registered overseas companies, legal gifts to family (why do you think the massive rise in "finding my overseas cousins" happened?), and setting up HK corporations that will invest funds overseas. Bitcoin and CC in general are now verboten as financial instruments in China, and no one will trust them anymore - because playing with them in any reasonable amount (10MM RMB or higher) can result in jailtime or worse...
Sucks if you're a CC speculator who's been relying upon the run-up in China/Asia to continue your gains - but that stool has just been kicked out from under you.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
in one case I'm buying ownership of the company. In another I'm buying a good (albeit an intangible one). The only real parallel is that in both cases you might be buying something completely worthless. But in the case of buying shares there's decades of case law and regulations about how that all goes down designed to protect small investors from being swindled out of their life savings (at least there are in the States, not sure about China).
China can and should control it. People can do dumb things in mass. The Housing crash of 2008 is a good example. Recent studies showed that it was mostly caused by upper middle class people buying houses to flip and inflated prices and not working poor buying McMansions. The crash happened because they weren't living in the houses so that when they eventually inflated the market too far to sell them they just let them foreclose and cut their loses. But that was only made possible by deregulation that made it profitable to sell risky house flipper loans to the upper middle class.
TL;DR;. You want the government to control what people can and cannot invest in. Otherwise you'll have massive economic crashes for no good reason.The economic equivalent to traffic jams on a clear highway.
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