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Bitcoin slides as China's central bank launches checks on exchanges
- LAMike 10y agoBitcoin is dying again...
- xj9 10y agoseems like this happens a lot.
- adtac 10y agoSo glad I cashed out the little BTC I had at $1,060/BTC a few days ago.
- zepolen 10y agoWhy are you glad about that? Also when did you buy them?
- adtac 10y agoQuite a while ago (maybe 4-5 years ago). I actually didn't buy them, I mined them. In fact I had totally forgotten about it until I saw a news article stating BTC had shot up to $1000+. >Why are you glad about that? Well, I don't expect it to raise back to USD$1000+ any time soon (it's ~$740 now).
- throwaway_btc1 10y agoI have some mined coins from 5-ish years ago, but it was on such an old bitcoin client I haven't been able to show proof of work in order to transfer them out of that wallet, and it seems to be pretty difficult to recover an old wallet, especially when I'm paranoid that the data will be snatched as soon as I reconnect that old computer to the internet, since the bitcoin client was so old it didn't have proper protections in place. I really should have had it all figured out so i could take advantage of this run, but I didn't. Now I'm kicking myself. I wasn't ready the last time it shot up over $1k/coin either.
- technofiend 10y agoCan't you load the latest client and then import your old wallet?
- throwaway_btc1 10y agoSupposedly it's more complicated than that for wallets made with old clients.
- c0nducktr 10y agoYou don't have to reconnect the computer to the internet to get access to the bitcoin in that wallet actually. You should be able to get the private key from from the wallet.dat file and then just import it to a new client. http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/4203/how-can-i-export-the-private-key-for-an-address-from-the-satoshi-client http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/4203/how-can-i-ex... If you end up getting rich, feel free to transfer some btc to 1P471RQS4Ga2xgakQWgbDL8WLajwPEdfMH as a thank you :)
- throwaway_btc1 10y agoOkay cool. I did try doing something similar before, by taking what appeared to be the private key out of the wallet.dat file and importing it elsewhere, and it showed my balance, but it wouldn't let me transfer the coins without 'proof of work'. I read online and I was lead to believe that I needed something more than just the private key for original mined coins in order to transfer them. And I won't be rich, unfortunately. I only left it on for only a week and mined a single block, back when you could actually do so from your home computer. If only I had left it on for a couple of months back then I would be rich, though. This will only help me dig out of debt and maybe make a downpayment on a house.
- c0nducktr 10y agoAs far as I know the private key should be enough, I wonder if it was an issue with the client you were trying to import them to. Anyway, one block is still pretty good as far as getting free money goes! Best of luck recovering them.
- draw_down 10y agoYou've heard of "buy low, sell high", yes?
- saycheese 10y agoIt's unclear what will happen, though it's possible China's moves long-term will increase Bitcoin's value because they'll use it as a financial tool both within China and outside of China. Given that China warned the miners of their intent in advance of the public disclosure, there's reason to speculate they did this to partner with them to control Bitcoin.
- runeks 10y ago> Given that China warned the miners of their intent in advance of the public disclosure, there's reason to speculate they did this to partner with them to control Bitcoin. How so? The worst they can do is mine empty blocks. This doesn't constitute controlling Bitcoin, but rather executing a continuous denial-of-service attack against it.
- EdHominem 10y agoAnd yet the market dynamics of that wouldn't be all that bad. They'd never get 100% of the blocks, so all they'd be doing is slowing down the flow of transactions and increasing the fees (because people would be paying for fewer spots in the non-DoS blocks, which would incentivize other miners. Bitcoin scales fees, instead of scaling transactions/second, so for a while it wouldn't be economical to use it for small purchases where the fees would be almost as much as the price, but for larger purposes, and as a store of value, it'd work just as well.
- runeks 10y agoI agree that it wouldn't be all that bad, but I disagree that they can't cause a complete standstill if they want to. If they have more than 50% of mining power, they simply refuse to build on top of the honest blocks (from the rest of the network). The clients will follow the longest chain. However, it's a costly attack to maintain in electricity alone -- with a dwindling income, since your income is denominated in the currency you're attacking -- and it wouldn't take that long for bitcoiners to get sufficiently pissed and change the hashing algorithm, thereby disarming this attacker completely.
- wildchild 10y agoFinally somebody can stop this shit.
- dolzenko 10y agoSo why Bitcoin is so big in China?
- runeks 10y agoIt's not that big in China, necessarily. The reason people assume it's big is because the large Chinese exchanges offer fee-less trading, whereas the Western exchanges usually charge 0.2% or so. This causes all the traders to move to e.g. BTC China, and their volume to be 50x that of the US exchanges. Some people interpret this as Chinese people buying bitcoins, but if you look at the order depth of the Chinese exchanges, it's clear that the USD Bitcoin market is much more liquid (by at least an order of magnitude), and the Chinese exchanges may just be used primarily for cheap speculation/day trading. Personally, I think the Chinese market is insignificant compared to the USD, and that the PBOC shouldn't have any effect on the USD price, so I've been buying call options throughout the crash.
- notahacker 10y agoIsn't at least part of the depth of the USD market relative to the yen market because a lot of the Chinese volume is driven by people that (i) ultimately want to obtain USD and (ii) spend their yuan on mining equipment?
- runeks 10y ago> [...] because a lot of the Chinese volume is driven by people that (i) ultimately want to obtain USD and (ii) spend their yuan on mining equipment? I guess I'm saying that I don't buy this narrative. "Chinese volume" is people from all around the world trading on BTC China. Anyone can open an account there, not just Chinese people.
- nchuhoai 10y agoWhere do you buy your options?
- runeks 10y ago
- ryanlol 10y agoBTC China statement: https://twitter.com/YourBTCC/status/819159971564662784 https://twitter.com/YourBTCC/status/819159971564662784
- iopq 10y agohttps://imgur.com/a/KDwtE https://imgur.com/a/KDwtE As relevant as ever
- jazoom 10y agoThat's very clever. Thanks for sharing.
- erikpukinskis 10y agoI wouldn't be surprised. Won't be an existential issue for Bitcoin though (beyond the temporary 2-5x price drop). Bitcoin doesn't need national approval to succeed. It will thrive in some jurisdictions and not in others. Nation states have the most to lose, since they draw so much of their power from the ability to manipulate currency, so we should expect to see a lot of attacks on Bitcoin by them.
- closeparen 10y agoNations can prevent their banking systems from interacting with exchanges. It should be easy enough to transfer value to citizens of restrictive countries regardless of the government's position; the trouble is the citizens' ability to transfer value out.
- erikpukinskis 10y agoBanks are just one of many ways to get credit denominated in Bitcoin. The point of Bitcoin is that your cousin Lenny can act as your bank.
- closeparen 10y agoYour cousin Lenny had to get his BTC somewhere, with either an exchange or a mining rig in the path. States can make both of those paths very difficult - paying the exchange could require smuggling cash out of the country, and anomalous electric usages are already used to identify marijuana grow operations.
- 10y ago
- matt_wulfeck 10y agoHow about a check on foreign realestate investment? I have a fantasy where China starts looking into homes its nationals own throughout the Bay Area in search of lost revenue, wherein the prices collapse because of a selling frenzy. The reality is that many of the foreign-owned homes here are owned by shadow offshores which are very hard to track.
- jbverschoor 10y agoAnd Amsterdam!
- ninjaroar 10y agoDo you really think China has a bigger impact on bay area housing than overpaid tech workers funded by venture capital?
- Hydraulix989 10y agoDefinitely.
- dwaltrip 10y agoThey don't need to have a bigger impact. A secondary cause shifting radically could easily affect the market noticeably, especially in specific segments. Btw, tech workers from venture backed startups generally make less than those working for the profitable tech giants, so it's a bit disingenuous to call them overpaid.
- kobeya 10y agoAs someone who recently bought a house, yes. We lost two houses to people who were bidding cash, even though they bid at a slightly lower price (cash closes fast). One was Chinese and the other was Russian. It makes the local tech workers paying with loans try to top the foreign bidders. But by the next sale the foreign buyers are bidding even more because they are sitting on piles of cash and can afford to do so. It's a real effect that every single person in the real estate industry we interacted with commented on. Also, you're giving yourself away as an outsider because VC-backed firms significantly underpay compared with the profitable tech giants.
- asc123 10y agohodl
- empath75 10y agoAs someone who spent a year or so trading bitcoin for fun. 1) It's a mostly unregulated market full of scammers and pump and dump schemes artificially manipulating the price. 2) All the news and rumors about bitcoin and any other crypto currency should be assumed to a lie propagated by someone to move the price in one direction or another. 3) Nobody on the internet who claims to know why the price of bitcoin goes up or down on a given day has any fucking idea what they're talking about, and if they didn't they wouldn't be posting about it online. 4) As long as bitcoin is useful for buying drugs or another criminal activity, it's going to be worth something. 5) When you suddenly start paying attention to bitcoin because the price has gone up a bunch recently, don't buy it, because it's about to crash.
- funkenstein_ 10y agoSo basically just like any other financial asset.
- derefr 10y ago> 3) Nobody on the internet who claims to know why the price of bitcoin goes up or down on a given day has any fucking idea what they're talking about, and if they didn't they wouldn't be posting about it online. I'm not one of these people or know any of them, so you might very well be right. In general, though, there are usually a (small) number of people observing any field who should be doing professional analysis work, but who don't "think they could do that sort of thing" or think it "takes someone way smarter than them." They have too low an opinion of their own knowledge to think it has value. So, instead, they go on giving away extremely high-value market analysis for free in the comments section of some blog.
- friendly_chap 10y agoDo you have an example of that?
- jeremyt 10y agoThe price crashed today because the BOC visited BTCC. I think that's obvious.
- Animats 10y agoFrom the article: "Trading between the yuan and bitcoin accounted for around 98 percent of the total market in the past six months." Yes, it's people getting yuan out of China. The big question for the last few years has been whether China would loosen capital controls, or tighten them. The decision seems to have been "tighten". Bitcoin is now a big enough leak that the People's Bank of China is starting to do something about it. China deliberately allows some leaks. You can take about $50,000 to Hong Kong in cash per person once a month. Sending all your relatives to Hong Kong every month, loaded up with cash to exchange, has been popular for years. But that only works if you have relatives near the border. Bitcoin was tolerated as a leak, as long as it didn't get too big. That may be changing.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- runeks 10y ago> From the article: "Trading between the yuan and bitcoin accounted for around 98 percent of the total market in the past six months." Yes, it's people getting yuan out of China. I don't at all agree that this is evident. BTC China has zero trading fees. All speculators go there to cheaply trade bitcoins. Volume is no indicator of anything, except the speed of their order matching engine. Bitcoins bidding on Yuan, and vice versa, is the important metric, and judging by it, the Chinese market is insignificant compared to the USD market (bitcoincharts.com/markets has order book depth by exchange).
- drcode 10y agoWell, there is SOME reason why Bitcoin spiked recently- It seems almost like it's due to an organic reason, since the speculation environment hasn't changed much in the last year to account for a large change- So far, the best theory to account for the spike I've heard is Chinese capital outflow. (Though it's always possible it's entirely due to "animal spirits of the market" and has no fundamental reason)
- mr_spothawk 10y ago
- jcoffland 10y agoThat no articles reached the front page as the price was rising says a lot about HN's general opinion of Bitcoin.
- olalonde 10y agoIt was on HN's front page 7 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13320198 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13320198. There does seem to be a lot of schadenfreude when it comes to Bitcoin though.
- jcoffland 10y agoNotice that article got 58 points whereas this one is currently at 163.
- throw2016 10y agoWhy should any private entity or group or technologists seek to control money? Money is the most important instrument in a society and must be under societal control operating within the proper framework of systems, accountability and rule of law. Given that bitcoin origins and management is completely nebulous and its proponents deceptively promoted and continue to promote it as some freedom libertarian thing when its closely controlled and in the end simply a way for early adopters to cash out. Early and greed fuelled adopters incessantly moan about a flawed banking and monetary system. Even if we accept their criticisms at face value how is it reasonable to then turn around and promote a 'solution' that has zero accountability to anyone and based on a inefficient system that shamelessly wastes electricity? This seems disingenious and self serving.