Re:Reports: Chinese authorities plan to shut local Bitcoin e...
by paulmd on Friday September 08, 2017 @11:38AM
(#15201034)
Money laundering and drug trade.
China has export controls to prevent USD from fleeing the country and weakening RMB. Instead, people buy mining equipment and export their wealth as Bitcoin.
Many of the institutions within the cryptocurrency world are also transparent money-laundering schemes. For example Nicehash is a system that lets people "earn money mining cryptocurrency" by "renting their hardware to bidders", but from a high-level perspective this is essentially miners getting paid in dirty money and giving bidders "clean" coins generated on their hardware.
The darknet drug trade needs no explanation, of course.
I tend to think the darknet trade would be sustainable on its own (at a much lower price), but the capital flight is where most of the runup is coming from. They're moving it to real-estate in places like BC and Australia.
Re:Reports: Chinese authorities plan to shut local Bitcoin e...
by TooSmugToFail on Friday September 08, 2017 @04:11PM
(#15203536)
You're forgetting that all those supposedly "clean" coins need to come back into fiat without tripping any alarms somehow, which is the central challenge in any laundering operation.
Plus, it makes absolutely no sense that this supposed money laundering scheme is the price driver, because if the intention is to launder money by buying/renting CPU power, then the fiat coming in would not have any upward pressure on the price (as it goes into hardware to mine coins) while at the same time the coins mined in such operation would actually push the price of BTC down.
Finally, I really can't see the connection behind Asians moving assets into real-estate in Canada and Australia and cryptocurrencies, unless such transaction are being paid for in crypto. I haven't heard/read of such cases.
My 2 cents: it's a classic bubble. Bunch of people made incredible nominal returns (think 100x or 1.000x) by having bought really early, and then price being driven up on relatively small volumes by new people increasingly piling in. This created an impressive social proof, and the masses started to pile in.
I'm sure we're in a bubble right now, and that it's going to burst/deflate. The question is when, and what's going to be the trigger. Judging from the recent events, heavy-handed regulation is a possible candidate for a trigger. There's so much bullshit ICO's, and that may be a red rag that sets the regulators on a crackdown.
That being said, I'm long term bullish on BTC and ETH, but there's likely going to be a massive extinction among the altcoins during the next bear period.
Re:Reports: Chinese authorities plan to shut local Bitcoin e...
by fragsworth on Friday September 08, 2017 @12:31PM
(#15201640)
You're totally ignoring legitimate purchasers who are using it for financial reasons, the same reason someone might buy gold - mostly as a hedge against economic disasters that would cause stock market and currency crashes.
It's objectively better than gold for this - more secure, easier to transfer, and guaranteed to be deflationary.
https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pr...
As usual Zero Hedge has written on this, this morning.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-09-08/bitcoin-crashes-mas...
China is really focusing on monetary policy of late, they are also trying to make the Yuan fall against the dollar.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-09-08/yuan-tumbles-after-...
Submitters: although we have deep respect for other languages, HN is an English-language site.
Dodgy rumour on QQ: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/2YfePTC0sGsFjHvf-HUqqA
Effect on price (screenshot from Coindesk this afternoon): https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/wp-content/uploads/2017...
Nothing to see here :-)
China has export controls to prevent USD from fleeing the country and weakening RMB. Instead, people buy mining equipment and export their wealth as Bitcoin.
Many of the institutions within the cryptocurrency world are also transparent money-laundering schemes. For example Nicehash is a system that lets people "earn money mining cryptocurrency" by "renting their hardware to bidders", but from a high-level perspective this is essentially miners getting paid in dirty money and giving bidders "clean" coins generated on their hardware.
The darknet drug trade needs no explanation, of course.
I tend to think the darknet trade would be sustainable on its own (at a much lower price), but the capital flight is where most of the runup is coming from. They're moving it to real-estate in places like BC and Australia.
Plus, it makes absolutely no sense that this supposed money laundering scheme is the price driver, because if the intention is to launder money by buying/renting CPU power, then the fiat coming in would not have any upward pressure on the price (as it goes into hardware to mine coins) while at the same time the coins mined in such operation would actually push the price of BTC down.
Finally, I really can't see the connection behind Asians moving assets into real-estate in Canada and Australia and cryptocurrencies, unless such transaction are being paid for in crypto. I haven't heard/read of such cases.
My 2 cents: it's a classic bubble. Bunch of people made incredible nominal returns (think 100x or 1.000x) by having bought really early, and then price being driven up on relatively small volumes by new people increasingly piling in. This created an impressive social proof, and the masses started to pile in.
I'm sure we're in a bubble right now, and that it's going to burst/deflate. The question is when, and what's going to be the trigger. Judging from the recent events, heavy-handed regulation is a possible candidate for a trigger. There's so much bullshit ICO's, and that may be a red rag that sets the regulators on a crackdown.
That being said, I'm long term bullish on BTC and ETH, but there's likely going to be a massive extinction among the altcoins during the next bear period.
It's objectively better than gold for this - more secure, easier to transfer, and guaranteed to be deflationary.
(wherein Bitcoin's recapitulation of the history of finance gets to quantitative easing)
http://finance.caixin.com/2017-09-08/101142797.html
No trade allowed between BTC and Yuan, as far as I can make out.
https://twitter.com/viabtc?lang=en
The Caixin report's Google translation seems to suggest it's just ICOs, though ...
was retweeted by ViaBTC, but then un-re-tweeted I guess
https://twitter.com/cnLedger/status/906197219560136705
Not seeing anything on 8btc yet ...