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by brilliantcode 3456 days ago
Unlikely to sustain as Chinese gov will announce bitcoin as illegal.

What's ironic is that the bitcoin pumpers have sold the myth that money is being snuck out of China through Bitcoin and some of the biggest miners and exchanges are in China.

Now it has the attention of President Xi and when they come down on bitcoin, they are coming down hard, along with the prices. It's unlikely to recover after this year's drop.

3 comments

I see that you know the future. How much money do you have on a short position?
I'm bitter that I got out at 744 USD resulting in net loss of $500 USD. $100 USD was the commission fee to sell around 2 bitcoins worth $1400 USD.

$100 comission folks. On buy AND when I closed my positions.

I don't know how to short bitcoin, poloniex didn't offer it? Curious to know more...wait no...I don't think I want to get into cryptocurrency anymore...will get into trading REAL regulated financial instruments.

Do we know if this surge is because bitcoin is being used to evade currency controls (and quickly converted into another currency) or if it's being used as a store of value?

It'll be interesting to see what happens if China cracks down on BTC while citizens are left with enormous wallets.

I've always trouble with that logic. If somebody is buying BTC by selling Yuan than somebody is buying the Yuan on the other side which means it's a game of hot potatoes-nobody wants to hold onto a depreciating asset as USD becomes stronger.

But Bitcoin is such an easy target now that the myth has been properly disseminated. Bitcoin may or may not even be used to move money out of China but that won't matter to a communist government!

How will they come down on it?
A lot of the mining happens there in quite big operations e.g. http://motherboard.vice.com/read/chinas-biggest-secret-bitco... (2015), which could conceivably be shutdown. But they could easily move on to other countries or just bribe the requisite officials.