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China Bitcoin The Almighty Buck Your Rights Online

Bitcoin In China Still Chugging Along, a Year After Clampdown 31

Posted by timothy from the government-vs-the-people dept.
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.
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Bitcoin In China Still Chugging Along, a Year After Clampdown More

Bitcoin In China Still Chugging Along, a Year After Clampdown

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  • Litecoin, Dogecoin, Darkcoin, Reddcoin... there's dozens of crypto-currencies out there. It's a mess.

    Get free satoshis and Dogecoins by using the links in my signature! (Hey, it's on-topic for once!)

  • It's a currency that is thought of as untraceable but isn't, so it gives them a new class of people they can squeeze whenever they want to.

  • Cannot regulate bitcoin in the traditional sense (Score:5, Informative)

    by brxndxn ( 461473 ) on Tuesday March 31, 2015 @09:51AM (#49378729)
    Bitcoin is a protocol more than it is a currency. Everything about the bitcoin protocol is made to keep a record of value that cannot be faked or stolen (when implemented properly). It is a complicated technology and governments will take a while to grasp it - just as it took years for governments and people to grasp just what 'the Internet' was. A government can make all the regulations or limitations it wants about Bitcoin - but it cannot have any influence over the Bitcoin protocol unless it participates. Participation makes Bitcoin stronger. There are no specifications in the protocol that give government any more control over Bitcoin protocol than anyone else that participates. If one country makes it harder (or illegal) for its population to use Bitcoin, that country and their population will have fewer Bitcoins.

    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.

    • Bitcoin is not a finite resource, or a resource at all. It was designed with artificial scarcity.

      I wouldn't waste the HDD space to store a bitcoin hash.

      • Bitcoin is not a finite resource, or a resource at all. It was designed with artificial scarcity.

        I wouldn't waste the HDD space to store a bitcoin hash.

        Sounds similar to diamonds -- let me guess, if someone gave you a diamond you'd just throw it out like the worthless little piece of carbon it is, am I right?

    • It is a complicated technology

      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.

      • It is a complicated technology

        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.

        Exactly this. Accountants have been dealing with multiple currencies, currency exchange, etc... for centuries. Bitcoin is nothing new, nor particularly complicated from an accounting point of view.

        The grandparent just sounds like a variant of the typical Bitcoin fan's anti-goverment rhetoric. He doesn't even grasp that the Chinese g

  • 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.

  • "That doesn't mean bitcoin is gaining steam as a currency used to buy goods. Since the government clampdown, the Chinese bitcoin market has matured into one that's focused on speculative trading, said Bobby Lee, CEO of BTC China."

    If your currency is nothing more than a Get Rich Quick Scheme, then it is doomed to failure. The currency must fill a niche that can not be filled with paper cash (Or bank transfers and credit cards), whether that is get around currency controls, buy stuff on the dark web or just t

    • The point of BTC is disintermediation. If you scratch the surface, you'll learn that everyone hates conventional banks, CC, etc - mainly because the intermediaries are extracting such a high toll. Yes, they are convenient enough to use, but just barely. The prospect of a secure, trust-free and cost-efficient way to buy directly, that's BTC's niche.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Mullen ( 14656 )

        > The prospect of a secure, trust-free and cost-efficient way to buy directly, that's BTC's niche

        I have that too, it's called a credit card. Seriously, Bitcoin brings nothing to the table in that space.

  • If its on the fringe, and the price is dropping, that is not what a sane person would consider as "thriving".

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