8 ms·

For those of you keeping track, this is about the 20th time China has declared to have banned Bitcoin or crypto. The only thing they've done is demonstrated tha

For those of you keeping track, this is about the 20th time China has declared to have banned Bitcoin or crypto. The only thing they've done is demonstrated that crypto is a threat to their all-reaching power grab and that they are mostly powerless to control it.

dougmwne 5y ago
This is a country rounding up a whole population of a religious minority and sending them to reeducation camps. A country that mobilized over a billion people to almost completely control covid. You are vastly underestimating the CCP, as most Westerns continue to do.
- Loughla 5y ago
  I've noticed this quite a bit, and I don't understand it. People keep writing articles and saying things amounting to 'it just won't last forever'. But the reason is, because it just won't, totalitarian governments don't last. Why wouldn't it? Strong central government. Clear economic and social goals with the ends justifying whatever unethical means. A complacent middle and upper class satiated by enough new wealth to make them fat(ter than they used to be) and happy. Why won't they be the next world power for the foreseeable future? Is there an anti-party faction in China that's larger and more powerful than I see in US media? Or is this just wishful thinking from the west?
  - avianlyric 5y ago
    Nothing wrong with the fundamentals of your argument, but growth can’t be unlimited. Eventually it’s starts slowing down, then those complacent middle class will start being less complacent and start demanding more freedom. I think it’s reasonable to say the CCP will keep their grip on power for as long as they can continue delivering wealth to the middle class, and lifting those in poverty into the middle class. What’s not clear is how long the CCP can continue delivering that wealth. The ongoing crisis with Everglade is showing that the CCP power and ability to generate wealth is not unlimited. I doubt it’s the beginning of the end, but it does shine a light on the long term structural flaws of their strategy. It’ll be interesting to see how the CCP deals with this over the next 10 to 20 years, maybe they’ll find a new strategy to maintain power, or maybe they’ll start a slow and gentle transition into democracy, allowing them to placate the middle class who won’t be seeing outsized wealth growth anymore.
    - selfhoster11 5y ago
      That newly freedom-thirsty middle class could be simply brutally suppressed by an automated police force, powered by AI-driven surveillance. The CCP is a long-term thinking government, I'm sure they are at least considering how it would work.
      - avianlyric 5y ago
        Perhaps, but a brutally suppressed population doesn’t tend to be a very productive one. Not saying it won’t happen, but I don’t think it’s a clear cut as you make it, and I think the CCP are smart enough to know that. They already do an astonishingly good job of treading the line between an authoritarian government that exploits it population for wealth, and one that empowers its populations for productivity and even greater wealth.
      - simmerup 5y ago
        The problem comes from the fact that educated, wealthy middle classes are not fungible I'm the same way peasants are. You can crush a thousand peasant farmers and replace them easily, you can't do that with the middle class without heavily setting back your economy and therefore being less competitive on the world stage. The CCP will need to decide whether they want to release control and let their population produce value, or keep control and be unable to compete as a world power. That's my take.
        true_religion 5y ago
        Considering the cultural revolution in China, the Siberian extermination camps of Soviet Russia, and the utterly bizarre treatment Imperial Britain had for petty criminals at the turn of the century, and the US Southern states fighting and dying for the right to enslave… I think that authoritarian governments would rather see tens if not hundreds of millions die before they ever lose their grip on power. When things go poorly there is always an internal scapegoat, and knowing that no matter how low your situation is it’s (a) not your fault and (b) there is someone who has it worse is a great way to keep social cohesion through troublesome times. And if all else fails, one can find an external party and invade them as both a distraction and a way to deliver spoils to your loyalists. I’d bet that things will get worse for ethnic and religious minorities in China during a downturn in the economy and if the economy continues to slowly slide for a decade then the neighbors of China like the Philippines will see more of their territory taken away.
  - 542458 5y ago
    I don’t think that it’s “a sure fire thing that it’ll collapse in N years” or anything, but I do have to wonder if a system that concentrates power that significantly would be less long-term stable, as all you need is one less-competent supreme leader to send the whole thing tumbling.
  - FabHK 5y ago
    Where did GP write "it just won't last forever"?
  - krageon 5y ago
    > Or is this just wishful thinking from the west? It's state propaganda. A (clever and very well designed) mix of known government actors and easily influenced third parties that work to push a specific narrative online. The thundering irony is that the west reports on such practices extensively when it comes to China, but the far more obvious actor (visible in the west) is your own government.
- npteljes 5y ago
  >A country that mobilized over a billion people to almost completely control covid. What do you mean by completely control covid? What intended result have they managed to arrive at?
  - kindle-dev 5y ago
    They have almost 0 community spread. A fact which many in the west respond to by saying that they’re faking their numbers, which completely ignores all of the counter measures they’ve taken. I have colleagues in China, and the Chinese lockdowns literally looked like a Zombie movie. It’s not surprising they were able to contain spread.
    - npteljes 5y ago
      I think they do both. I mean, the gross misreporting of the numbers, AND the harsh lockdown measures.
      - whydoibother 5y ago
        Well if you think it, it must be true.
- agumonkey 5y ago
  Its not ccp only. Many asian countries were very obedient and self controling, contrary to many western places.
- MickerNews 5y ago
  That's a ridiculous and obvious lie. This kind of absurd nonsense can only be founded on bigotry.
  - dougmwne 5y ago
    I am a bigot for reading Wikipedia? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_internment_camps https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_internment_camps
    - whydoibother 5y ago
      How dare China tries to stop jihadi networks in its country. One the Saudis, UAE, and the good ol CIA have every intention of using to destabilize China.
    - MickerNews 5y ago
      You're a bigot for pretending to believe such obvious bullshit.
      - rfd4sgmk8u 5y ago
        And you are choosing to ignore the most unsavory aspects that have been raised in the west because your local media has told you otherwise. Its absolutely true! There are very strong analogies here with Holocaust denialism, which some states see as such a problem they outlaw the philosophy! It is not bigotry to stand up to authoritarianism and human rights abuses. You wield that term bigot to downplay the vast and monstrous human rights abuses occurring in Xinjiang. Its absolutely nothing to do with race or nationality. There is nothing intrinsic that would permit such actions to be attributed to this. It is not about bigotry. Connecting the two is all part of the metagame in pushing a state propaganda. Make your accuser seem less credible so you never have to address the actual substance of the complaint. The reported incidents include Forced Labor and Sexual Abuse, Organ Harvesting and Genocide. On mass. This happened. This is happening. There is plenty of neutral international sources on this. Saying it doesn't exist is absurd. There is clear evidence of this! These are not lies told by the western media, as the Chinese media claims. These are happening, they have been reported by people that have escaped, they have been raised to the UN. Most of the world has denounced this...
- powerapple 5y ago
  Stop spreading "opinions" please. a whole population means basically you have inflated the inflated 1 millions to 7 or 8 millions people. Use your brain.
  - dougmwne 5y ago
    You're trying to say that because the Chinese Government has only detained an estimated million+ Uyghurs, it's completely fine because it wasn't literally all of them? You must realize that these flimsy efforts to defend the Chinese Government only makes it more obvious that the government is increasingly detached from the reality the rest of the world lives in, to the point where it says 2+2=5 and without irony believes it.
    - powerapple 5y ago
      No, I am not. I am trying to say, stop making unreasonable accusations, regardless your motive. Media already publish only sensational headlines, at least, we, normal people, can behave better than them. Because you believe you are righteous does not mean you can spread false information you can easily question with your brain, the same as you believe you are righteous does not mean you can go into other country for WMD.
Jensson 5y ago
They banned crypto mining before, but did they really ban crypto transactions before? This seems like the last step to make crypto coins 100% illegal in China.
eli 5y ago
That doesn't sound as reassuring as you think it does.
RivieraKid 5y ago
Can you provide a source for some previous crypto ban? AFAIK this is the first time they've made crypto transactions illegal.
- shlant 5y ago
  2013: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-12-05/china-s-pboc-bans-financial-companies-from-bitcoin-transactions https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-12-05/china-s-p... 2015: https://archive.is/Higoz https://archive.is/Higoz 2017: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-bitcoin-china-idUSKCN1BJ1US https://www.reuters.com/article/us-bitcoin-china-idUSKCN1BJ1... 2018: https://www.businessinsider.com/china-eliminates-all-cryptocurrency-trading-2018-2 https://www.businessinsider.com/china-eliminates-all-cryptoc... 2021: https://archive.is/s7nbw https://archive.is/s7nbw "China Has Banned Bitcoin 13 Times Since 2012": https://finance.yahoo.com/news/china-great-bitcoin-mining-migration-134452993.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/china-great-bitcoin-mining-mi...
  - dannyw 5y ago
    Your link from 2013: "The public is free to participate in Internet transactions provided they take on the risk themselves, it said."
- aeternum 5y ago
  It happened so often even prior to 2014 that it was meme-worthy: https://imgur.com/a/KDwtE#WzkZ3W5 https://imgur.com/a/KDwtE#WzkZ3W5
FabHK 5y ago
> they are mostly powerless to control it. What makes you think that? You do realise that they could easily outlaw 1) miners, 2) exchanges that convert to fiat, and 3) people privately exchanging to fiat, and (domestically) enforce that reasonably well, too. And sure, there could still be an underground market - you can get still get weed and cocaine in China or Singapore, but I wouldn't recommend participating in it.
- stiltzkin 5y ago
  You can exchange FIAT using P2P.
- tgtweak 5y ago
  They literally did this already (miners were kicked out/shut down, the exchanges were shut down or put in line, and now the broad legality of simply owning/transferring them), and Bitcoin is still doing it's thing, more or less unphased (let's be real, a 10% dip is hardly remarkable in the crypto world) - demonstrating in technicolor how even the most empowered state, with far-reaching and unilateral control of every domain that cryptocurrency requires to operate (law, finance and telecommunication), is relatively useless in it's ability to hinder the mechanics of cryptocurrency. Driving it more underground will not squash it.
MillenialMan 5y ago
I would think the main thing they're afraid of is that it allows Chinese citizens to operate outside the state apparatus of surveillance.

dougmwne 5y ago

This is a country rounding up a whole population of a religious minority and sending them to reeducation camps. A country that mobilized over a billion people to almost completely control covid. You are vastly underestimating the CCP, as most Westerns continue to do.

Loughla 5y ago
I've noticed this quite a bit, and I don't understand it. People keep writing articles and saying things amounting to 'it just won't last forever'. But the reason is, because it just won't, totalitarian governments don't last. Why wouldn't it? Strong central government. Clear economic and social goals with the ends justifying whatever unethical means. A complacent middle and upper class satiated by enough new wealth to make them fat(ter than they used to be) and happy. Why won't they be the next world power for the foreseeable future? Is there an anti-party faction in China that's larger and more powerful than I see in US media? Or is this just wishful thinking from the west?
- avianlyric 5y ago
  Nothing wrong with the fundamentals of your argument, but growth can’t be unlimited. Eventually it’s starts slowing down, then those complacent middle class will start being less complacent and start demanding more freedom. I think it’s reasonable to say the CCP will keep their grip on power for as long as they can continue delivering wealth to the middle class, and lifting those in poverty into the middle class. What’s not clear is how long the CCP can continue delivering that wealth. The ongoing crisis with Everglade is showing that the CCP power and ability to generate wealth is not unlimited. I doubt it’s the beginning of the end, but it does shine a light on the long term structural flaws of their strategy. It’ll be interesting to see how the CCP deals with this over the next 10 to 20 years, maybe they’ll find a new strategy to maintain power, or maybe they’ll start a slow and gentle transition into democracy, allowing them to placate the middle class who won’t be seeing outsized wealth growth anymore.
  - selfhoster11 5y ago
    That newly freedom-thirsty middle class could be simply brutally suppressed by an automated police force, powered by AI-driven surveillance. The CCP is a long-term thinking government, I'm sure they are at least considering how it would work.
    - avianlyric 5y ago
      Perhaps, but a brutally suppressed population doesn’t tend to be a very productive one. Not saying it won’t happen, but I don’t think it’s a clear cut as you make it, and I think the CCP are smart enough to know that. They already do an astonishingly good job of treading the line between an authoritarian government that exploits it population for wealth, and one that empowers its populations for productivity and even greater wealth.
    - simmerup 5y ago
      The problem comes from the fact that educated, wealthy middle classes are not fungible I'm the same way peasants are. You can crush a thousand peasant farmers and replace them easily, you can't do that with the middle class without heavily setting back your economy and therefore being less competitive on the world stage. The CCP will need to decide whether they want to release control and let their population produce value, or keep control and be unable to compete as a world power. That's my take.
      - true_religion 5y ago
        Considering the cultural revolution in China, the Siberian extermination camps of Soviet Russia, and the utterly bizarre treatment Imperial Britain had for petty criminals at the turn of the century, and the US Southern states fighting and dying for the right to enslave… I think that authoritarian governments would rather see tens if not hundreds of millions die before they ever lose their grip on power. When things go poorly there is always an internal scapegoat, and knowing that no matter how low your situation is it’s (a) not your fault and (b) there is someone who has it worse is a great way to keep social cohesion through troublesome times. And if all else fails, one can find an external party and invade them as both a distraction and a way to deliver spoils to your loyalists. I’d bet that things will get worse for ethnic and religious minorities in China during a downturn in the economy and if the economy continues to slowly slide for a decade then the neighbors of China like the Philippines will see more of their territory taken away.
- 542458 5y ago
  I don’t think that it’s “a sure fire thing that it’ll collapse in N years” or anything, but I do have to wonder if a system that concentrates power that significantly would be less long-term stable, as all you need is one less-competent supreme leader to send the whole thing tumbling.
- FabHK 5y ago
  Where did GP write "it just won't last forever"?
- krageon 5y ago
  > Or is this just wishful thinking from the west? It's state propaganda. A (clever and very well designed) mix of known government actors and easily influenced third parties that work to push a specific narrative online. The thundering irony is that the west reports on such practices extensively when it comes to China, but the far more obvious actor (visible in the west) is your own government.
npteljes 5y ago
>A country that mobilized over a billion people to almost completely control covid. What do you mean by completely control covid? What intended result have they managed to arrive at?
- kindle-dev 5y ago
  They have almost 0 community spread. A fact which many in the west respond to by saying that they’re faking their numbers, which completely ignores all of the counter measures they’ve taken. I have colleagues in China, and the Chinese lockdowns literally looked like a Zombie movie. It’s not surprising they were able to contain spread.
  - npteljes 5y ago
    I think they do both. I mean, the gross misreporting of the numbers, AND the harsh lockdown measures.
    - whydoibother 5y ago
      Well if you think it, it must be true.
agumonkey 5y ago
Its not ccp only. Many asian countries were very obedient and self controling, contrary to many western places.
MickerNews 5y ago
That's a ridiculous and obvious lie. This kind of absurd nonsense can only be founded on bigotry.
- dougmwne 5y ago
  I am a bigot for reading Wikipedia? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_internment_camps https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_internment_camps
  - whydoibother 5y ago
    How dare China tries to stop jihadi networks in its country. One the Saudis, UAE, and the good ol CIA have every intention of using to destabilize China.
  - MickerNews 5y ago
    You're a bigot for pretending to believe such obvious bullshit.
    - rfd4sgmk8u 5y ago
      And you are choosing to ignore the most unsavory aspects that have been raised in the west because your local media has told you otherwise. Its absolutely true! There are very strong analogies here with Holocaust denialism, which some states see as such a problem they outlaw the philosophy! It is not bigotry to stand up to authoritarianism and human rights abuses. You wield that term bigot to downplay the vast and monstrous human rights abuses occurring in Xinjiang. Its absolutely nothing to do with race or nationality. There is nothing intrinsic that would permit such actions to be attributed to this. It is not about bigotry. Connecting the two is all part of the metagame in pushing a state propaganda. Make your accuser seem less credible so you never have to address the actual substance of the complaint. The reported incidents include Forced Labor and Sexual Abuse, Organ Harvesting and Genocide. On mass. This happened. This is happening. There is plenty of neutral international sources on this. Saying it doesn't exist is absurd. There is clear evidence of this! These are not lies told by the western media, as the Chinese media claims. These are happening, they have been reported by people that have escaped, they have been raised to the UN. Most of the world has denounced this...
powerapple 5y ago
Stop spreading "opinions" please. a whole population means basically you have inflated the inflated 1 millions to 7 or 8 millions people. Use your brain.
- dougmwne 5y ago
  You're trying to say that because the Chinese Government has only detained an estimated million+ Uyghurs, it's completely fine because it wasn't literally all of them? You must realize that these flimsy efforts to defend the Chinese Government only makes it more obvious that the government is increasingly detached from the reality the rest of the world lives in, to the point where it says 2+2=5 and without irony believes it.
  - powerapple 5y ago
    No, I am not. I am trying to say, stop making unreasonable accusations, regardless your motive. Media already publish only sensational headlines, at least, we, normal people, can behave better than them. Because you believe you are righteous does not mean you can spread false information you can easily question with your brain, the same as you believe you are righteous does not mean you can go into other country for WMD.

Jensson 5y ago

They banned crypto mining before, but did they really ban crypto transactions before? This seems like the last step to make crypto coins 100% illegal in China.

eli 5y ago

That doesn't sound as reassuring as you think it does.

RivieraKid 5y ago

Can you provide a source for some previous crypto ban? AFAIK this is the first time they've made crypto transactions illegal.

shlant 5y ago
2013: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-12-05/china-s-pboc-bans-financial-companies-from-bitcoin-transactions https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-12-05/china-s-p... 2015: https://archive.is/Higoz https://archive.is/Higoz 2017: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-bitcoin-china-idUSKCN1BJ1US https://www.reuters.com/article/us-bitcoin-china-idUSKCN1BJ1... 2018: https://www.businessinsider.com/china-eliminates-all-cryptocurrency-trading-2018-2 https://www.businessinsider.com/china-eliminates-all-cryptoc... 2021: https://archive.is/s7nbw https://archive.is/s7nbw "China Has Banned Bitcoin 13 Times Since 2012": https://finance.yahoo.com/news/china-great-bitcoin-mining-migration-134452993.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/china-great-bitcoin-mining-mi...
- dannyw 5y ago
  Your link from 2013: "The public is free to participate in Internet transactions provided they take on the risk themselves, it said."
aeternum 5y ago
It happened so often even prior to 2014 that it was meme-worthy: https://imgur.com/a/KDwtE#WzkZ3W5 https://imgur.com/a/KDwtE#WzkZ3W5

FabHK 5y ago

> they are mostly powerless to control it. What makes you think that? You do realise that they could easily outlaw 1) miners, 2) exchanges that convert to fiat, and 3) people privately exchanging to fiat, and (domestically) enforce that reasonably well, too. And sure, there could still be an underground market - you can get still get weed and cocaine in China or Singapore, but I wouldn't recommend participating in it.

stiltzkin 5y ago
You can exchange FIAT using P2P.
tgtweak 5y ago
They literally did this already (miners were kicked out/shut down, the exchanges were shut down or put in line, and now the broad legality of simply owning/transferring them), and Bitcoin is still doing it's thing, more or less unphased (let's be real, a 10% dip is hardly remarkable in the crypto world) - demonstrating in technicolor how even the most empowered state, with far-reaching and unilateral control of every domain that cryptocurrency requires to operate (law, finance and telecommunication), is relatively useless in it's ability to hinder the mechanics of cryptocurrency. Driving it more underground will not squash it.

MillenialMan 5y ago

I would think the main thing they're afraid of is that it allows Chinese citizens to operate outside the state apparatus of surveillance.