China Bans Financial, Payment Institutions From Cryptocurrency Business (cnbc.com) 98
China has banned financial institutions and payment companies from providing services related to cryptocurrency transactions, and warned investors against speculative crypto trading. From a report: Under the ban, such institutions, including banks and online payments channels, must not offer clients any service involving cryptocurrency, such as registration, trading, clearing and settlement, three industry bodies said in a joint statement on Tuesday. "Recently, crypto currency prices have skyrocketed and plummeted, and speculative trading of cryptocurrency has rebounded, seriously infringing on the safety of people's property and disrupting the normal economic and financial order," they said in the statement. China has banned crypto exchanges and initial coin offerings but has not barred individuals from holding cryptocurrencies.
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Also crypto mining is going renewable. Even the seemingly-confused Musk has admitted it incentivizes renewables lol
Regulation is coming but it won't be to kill off crypto, rather it will be to further legitimize it IMO.
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Because fiat and banks aren't used for crime too?
Of course they were. That's why we have made their transactions as traceable as possible.
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Crypto mining will never be 'renewable' (Score:2)
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"Recently, crypto currency prices have skyrocketed and plummeted"
It's a fucking grift and you know it. But hey go ahead and by company scrip.
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So a kid caught shop lifting, should be put into the mob, to commit murder, because he already had committed a crime in the past?
Crytocurrencies are just way to volatile for institutions like banks, who need to maintain a degree of trust that the money you put into it will come back out.
I would never buy anything with a bitcoin, because if I hold onto it for a bit longer, its price may rise a lot. Or if it drops, it could drop like a rock, and I would have lost a lot of wealth overnight. So money you ca
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And do you need your Mother to hold your hand as you cross the road as well? Seriously, the desire for people to live in such a nanny state is beyond me. If you can't see that investing in any type of digital currency is highly speculative just means you will fall prey to other fiasco's.
Re:Other countries should follow suit (Score:5, Interesting)
Right. You're all for "caveat emptor", and who cares about outright fraud?
No, not only is crypto for crime - and that includes YOU, PERSONALLY, stealing from me, by not paying taxes on it, making me pay higher taxes, but iit's also only suitable for a casino... given that paying with crypto is like paying by handing over all or part of a stock certificate, and the payee is hoping that it won't go down in value when they go to use it.
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No, not only is crypto for crime - and that includes YOU, PERSONALLY, stealing from me, by not paying taxes on it, making me pay higher taxes,
What the actual fuck?
What is the color of the sky in the world you live in?
If everyone paid all the taxes they "owe", there would always be one more idiot pushing for more taxes because there is always another problem to solve.
We can talk about taxes when we get governments to actually spend the money carefully and when we can get them to stop devaluing money by printing more and more of it.
For fuck's sake, the US could take in DOUBLE the amount of taxes it currently receives and it would still be pr
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No one cares about taxes being used to pay for anything, they just care that they are being used to attack their political foes. It would be reasonable to discuss "tax and spend Democrats" and "borrow and spend Republicans" as recently as a decade or so ago, but at this point we are way past that. Every dollar of taxes we pay will be used as collateral to secure MORE than a dollar of loan, and will need to be paid back at a higher rate. The dollar the government takes is simply used to secure more debt.
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and the payee is hoping that it won't go down in value when they go to use it.
And how is that different than any fiat currency? You know that inflation that's kicking in right now? That's your fiat US dollars going down in value.
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Ah, I so enjoy 'fiscal conservatives' trying to understand how macroeconomics works. The mental contortions they have to undergo & then still not making any sense is... wonderfully bewildering in itself.
Here's the thing: Govt. taxes don't pay for anything. If the govt. wants to stimulate economic activity in any particular area, they just issue the money. Govt. taxes are merely a way of controlling the circulation of money, just like issuing it is. There's no books to be balanced & no great big omni
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The environmental and criminal consequences are dire and its adoption is the result of an unprecedented regulatory failure.
I can't argue with you about the consequences of the environmental damage of crypto. I do think blaming criminal activity is over rated. A sack of cash is far more untraceable than a blockchain entry. Criminal activity will find away even if crypto is banned. Like the previously mentioned sack of cash.
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Sack of gold is even more desirable, than said sack of cash. Not only is gold even less traceable, it's more universal. I doubt a North Korean criminal enterprise is going to sake a suitcase full of US cash but would be more than happy to take one full of US gold.
Re: Other countries should follow suit (Score:1)
At over 1500kg, a suitcase full of gold is rather difficult to carry, even if it doesn't burst at the seams.
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1500 kg of gold is worth $90 million dollars.
If you're making a transaction that big, you should be able to rent a truck to carry that for you.
Re:Other countries should follow suit (Score:4)
So the rise in ransom war is in no way related to the ease in which they can accept non reversible payments.. I guess they could just ask you to hand them a stack of cash... that wouldn't increase their exposure and risk..
Not really. There are plenty of other non reversible payment systems out there. Just look up kitboga or scambaiter on YouTube. Those scammers take payment in google play cards. I suspect if bitcoin wasn't around, or if it gets banned, the ransomware creators would just use this system.
Just to be clear the google play cards are reversible if caught in time. The key being "caught in time." Once the funds are removed from the google system, they are non-reversible.
You'd actually be surprised (Score:2)
One of the most common ways criminals are caught is when they start spending all those ill gotten gains and the cops come knocking.
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hat sack of cash becomes very traceable as soon as you start trying to use it.
By that logic, any medium of exchange becomes tractable just as soon as you use it. That can be a sack of gold, cash, bitcoins, or bails of cow chips. The key to get around that is to launder it so dirty money becomes clean money that won't attract the attention of Andy and Barney. Which is standard practice in all criminal enterprises that are not run by amateurs.
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A sack of cash is far more untraceable than a blockchain entry.
I have a counterpoint for you... A sack of cash is a physical object - therefore it is easier to "catch" the sender or recipient when a transmission occurs than with a crypto trade.
I give you an example of a crime involving extortion: the person being extorted is targeted anonymously over e-mail or other means and victims encouraged to send the assailant's payment using crypto. Typical example would be some piece of Russian malware encry
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This may already be in the plans, but other countries should follow suit quickly. Cryptocurrency has done and holds the potential to do far more harm than good. The environmental and criminal consequences are dire and its adoption is the result of an unprecedented regulatory failure.
I think I just heard a bubble pop.
Apparently there are quite a few mobsters with mod points in here.
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There's a ton of other posts arguing about "fiat currency does the same thing!" "Environmental concerns!" "We're adults, the government shouldn't track our consumption!"
Nonsense. Get over it. The real issue that people seem to refuse to face, and that crypto currency is trying to circumvent but will never be able to do, is that currency control is a political tool used by States to control the economy
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Crypto proponents should be proud they got this far to get the attention of a State, but once that attention turns, the game is over. There is nothing that crypto can do to stop regulation that just bans it outright, so it's ability to truly challenge fiat currency is an illusion.
For those interested, there will always be ways to access it. Same as how people in China can still access YouTube despite it being officially forbidden. However, it'll lose mass market appeal, which means much lower prices and transaction fees.
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This may already be in the plans, but other countries should follow suit quickly. Cryptocurrency has done and holds the potential to do far more harm than good. The environmental and criminal consequences are dire and its adoption is the result of an unprecedented regulatory failure.
Quoting you against the censor mods, though in this case I think they are probably coming from Bitcoin gamblers.
However, a specific response regarding the "environmental" consequences. That is a specific problem with Bitcoin, not intrinsic to the idea of cryptocurrency. I see it as a psychological gimmick to create fake scarcity so the Bitcoin "miners" can convince themselves there is some actual value in Bitcoin. It created a gold rush mentality. The miners are deluding themselves, though Bitcoin is still
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> The environmental and criminal consequences are dire
Oh fucking quit it. You can easily make a cryptocurrency that has no "environmental consequences"- "proof of stake"- and for those who distrust anything not bound by physical reality (which proof of work accomplishes), there's also "proof of capacity", which moves the economic stake from "how much relatively expensive energy can I use on this relatively cheap ASIC" to "how many relatively expensive hard drives can I spin up with this relatively cheap
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All money is basically digging one hole with no purpose to fill another hole with no purpose over and over again and getting paid for doing "work".
FTFY.
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You know you just effectively described how mining works in cryptocurrencies right? Likewise people get paid in BTC or ETH, for doing the same kind of work, with literally no difference except that the USD is more stable than these other currencies but then again they could of gotten rich during some of these swings because the value of their previous wages great exponentially. I wouldn't mind a portion of my wages in crypto but then again, I live and work in China.
Also, it's debatable in all circumstances
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Right. Debt based money works by filling a void with no purpose over and over again. Just because the hole is now infinite, doesn't mean the game changed. Likewise the debt has a value which is how China effectively pins the RMB at 1 USD to 7 RMB. They do this, by buying and selling US debt as if it's yet another commodity. This is why they are accused of currency manipulation -- because they are manipulating their currency by using the very same mechanics we have decided work good but they are using to the
The Chinese governments' real reasons: (Score:3, Insightful)
2. They won't ban citizens from having cryptocurrency so they can use posession/use of it as an excuse to harass and/or detain citizens who are anti-government
That being said I still think so-called 'cryptocurrency' is a massive troll-meme and it's only real-world use is to support crime, otherwise it's environmentally hostile.
While you weren't looking crypto because useful. (Score:2)
it's only real-world use is to support crime,
This is simply not true. I've bought as number of things recently using crypto that had nothing to do with anything illegal - you can buy gold/silver with it, and I bought something on a European website where I would otherwise have had to work out how to convert my money to euros to make a purchase, crypto was much easier.
Because of the volatility I don't keep a lot in crypto at any one time, but I find it useful to put some money into crypto every month and m
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You're either a fool or a criminal to involve yourself with it, or a jackass in your particular case.
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2. Shut the fuck up, idiot
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Your so-called 'real world use' of cryptocurrency is incidental and not significant.
It's not to me, or to millions of others. As I said, what you think is from the distant past. Many, many people are using crypto in the real world to buy things now. Crypto ATMS are all over the place now allowing for easy cash to bring to local stores. You appear to have no understanding of two space whatsoever; I'll let you have the last response as you can't say anything informed on the subject but I would encourage y
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Crypto didn't need conversion (by me). (Score:1)
You found it harder to convert dollars (I assume) to Euros than it was to convert dollars to crypto to Euros?
Not quite like that, your first part is right - as you assumed, I have dollars, would have had to figure out how to to a transfer I think where the amount transferred was in euros. I honestly didn't go look at how that would have to be done with my bank, since they also accepted crypto and I had enough crypto to cover the cost.
With crypto I could send the crypto I had directly, no conversion to euro
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Re:The Chinese governments' real reasons: (Score:5, Interesting)
Missed the most important one
3) Can't restrict transfer for wealth out of the country.
The amount of capital trying to flee China is immense - because the wealthy realize the government is the impediment in them keeping that wealth and in making more money.
The Chinese government has an uneasy relationship with the wealthy - because the wealthy know that the only real way to grow would be to overthrow the government and install a democratic one - centralized communist government works until you get so big you're wasting more time managing the managers than actually governing.
As long as capital export is controlled, the government has power over the people. But once that capital flees the country, the people who own that capital can flee as well when things go south. If you have millions in China, the government can come after you at will and seize it. If you export it out of China, it's a lot harder for China to claim it.
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China wants people to invest in China. Create jobs in China, make Chinese people richer. All you globalists can pound sand.
Ding ding ding. We have a winner. Where do I send the Chicken dinner?
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This. I would vote you up 10x if I had the points.
The reason China needs total control is power over the people. "Financial stability" is just a pretext - nobody in the Politburo, not Winnie the Pooh, actually cares anyway.
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hat being said I still think so-called 'cryptocurrency' is a massive troll-meme and it's only real-world use is to support crime, otherwise it's environmentally hostile.
While is has proven, in it's current implementation, of being environmentally hostile, I can't help but think this doesn't have to be the case. With a increase in the use of renewable energy for one. I also wonder if a better system couldn't be establish that didn't require so much energy.
I also think if crypto was to become more environmentally friendly more people would be willing to use it. The next 10 years in the crypto world are going to be very interesting.
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Besides which all the 'renewable energy' of which you speak could be put to far better uses than this.
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This is a solved problem that's in a transition phase. The world didn't get rid of all it's incandescent light bulbs for CFLs and LEDs overnight either.
Current 'proof of work' style cryptocurrencies are going to lose out long term to alternative validation methods like proof of stake. While the electricity cost of PoS block generation isn't zero, it's a far cry from current PoW mining. Conservative estimates say that the eventual switch of ethereum to PoS will reduce the electricity costs of block validati
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While I've not read the article yet, there it is making it's way across /. this morning about Ethereum cutting its power consumption by 99%.
https://cryptobriefing.com/eth... [cryptobriefing.com]
If this is true this will remove the problem crypto has with the environment. This will eliminate one of the two issues I have with crypto. The second being the unstable value each "coin" has. Without an stable market value crypto is worthless as a currency for everyday use.
This is disinformation (Score:4, Informative)
China only reinterated past anti-speculation legistlation. It did not "ban crypto-currency".
Disrupting the normal economic and financial order (Score:2)
corrupt (Score:2)
What we should be forbidding is giving the government that much power.
Maybe China wants to drive out foreign options? (Score:3)
Step 1: Ban current cryptocurrency options from the west.
Step 2: Let usage dwindle to near zero to minimize damage for the next step...
Step 3: Offer a new Chinese-created version and mandate that it be used for ALL business transactions.
Seems like an easy, monopolistic way to capture control of the market: Leverage your position.
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Because digital currencies are actually cheaper. Printing money and moving money costs... money and resources which is also money. China is already creating digital currencies, though I do not know how much they employ a digital block-chain but if anything the ledger is more centralized than Bitcoin.
China plans crypto to track transactions worldwide (Score:2)
Again? (Score:1)
How often can China ban Bitcoin? I keep hearing this every time around new all time highs.
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Ban the competition (Score:1)
Great timing.
https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/n... [yahoo.com]
Making room for e-Yuan? (Score:2)
Perhaps they really hope that this pseudo cryptocurrency will take off.
Banning other cryptocurrencies, I'd say it's expected. Just like how the Ant Group was pressured to change its core business - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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LOL so it's you again?
e-Yuan is a pseudo cryptocurrency. Just like Bitcoin Cash.
Come back when e-Yuan supports anonymity - oh, it won't. Don't even try.
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LOL. e-Yuan is of course not designed to be a cryptocurrency. However it's the responsibility of any righteous human being to expose the scheme of the CCP, who tries to lend international legitimacy to e-Yuan through conflating it with actual cryptocurrencies.
Check this out, if *you* care to educate yourself.
https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/n... [yahoo.com]
See the C word? This title is wrong, and is the confusion that needs to be repeatedly clarified. That e-Yuan is NOT a cryptocurrency.
Cryptocurrency: decentralized, c
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A cryptocurrency is a digital or virtual currency that is secured by cryptography, which makes it nearly impossible to counterfeit or double-spend. Many cryptocurrencies are decentralized networks based on blockchain technology—a distributed ledger enforced by a disparate network of computers. A defining feature of cryptocurrencies is that they are generally not issued by any central authority, rendering them theoretically immune to government interference or manipulation.
Take note of the phrases "many cryptocurrencies" and "generally not issued". This doesn't mean it's a requirement -- it means it's a commonality. You are wrong when you say a crypto has to be decentralized. Crypto-currency is virtually synonymous with block-chain the technological mechanism behind it which employs cryptographic principles to secure the ledger. This can be centralized and run by a government even but initial implementations weren't. Many networks are born this way, including the general grou
Beware (Score:2)
Real (Score:2)
I can guarantee you the oligarchs rode it all the way up. Now it's time to twist the handle.
This has always been the potential downfall. Those with the power to muck about with markets happily do so.
"For the benefit of the people" has always been for the rubes.
How the obsolete make themselves irrelevant (Score:3)
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I think China is exploring block-chain for a number of uses. I can link you to a Shine.cn article outlining a new blockchain solution in the works for artists which I recently read a small except about (I am happy to link it if you're interested but it was extremely brief). They also are the first to start using blockchain in supply chains, so you can track the authenticity of products. However, this matter is more complex than most any of the posters. The major point is China is supremely embracing the tec
But they haven't banned mining or holding it. (Score:2)
Is it the same reason they locked down domestic travel but still let people fly internationally from Wuhan?