Bitcoin Forum

once again the public bank of China started messing with bitcoin exchanges (a couple of days ago) and once again the trading volume in localbitcoins China went to the moon.

and this is while price is still pretty stable:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C4hvsrsXAAAuhpB.jpg

I still don't understand what actually happened here[1] , I mean the chinese exchanges simply vanished and have no volume at all while Japan is taking the lead now? I heard that they stopped the withdrawals but isn't that finished yet ?

[1] https://coinmarketcap.com/exchanges/volume/24-hour/all/

A truly interesting find, ty BrewMaster. That's a high volume for localbit. It's pretty clear that Bitcoin trading will probably find its ways even in the most delicate situations. I think we urgently need a truly decentralized resilient exchange.

Do you think the 'People' have figured out the Central Bank scam?

Is that volume panic trading on localbitcoins??


https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-02-08/china-central-bank-said-to-call-bitcoin-exchanges-for-more-talks


Very curious as to the outcome with this...

8  )

look at there: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin/#markets
OKCOin is still on top of the 24 hour trade volume for bitcoin for some reason!


well credit goes to /u/bitcohen who shared this on Reddit and i thought it was interesting enough to post the picture here too.


What scam?
the Central bank is and will try to regulate exchanges because they are working with fiat currency and have to follow the fiat rules.

panic trading? maybe, maybe not.
this is not the first time PBoC is doing things like this and this is not the first time volume on localbitcoins goes through the roof.

This is not surprising, but still good to see. If you take the usual possibilities to do something away from the people, then they will find a way to adjust. This means, that some might decide to give it up, but still have coins to give up. Some see this as an opportunity and want to buy some more. Other depend on it to earn money or pay the bills. All these people look for the next best thing to exchange their money. Localbitcoins is the next logical thing, so it was expected to explode. That it happened shows that there is logic behind it and i would be concerned if we could see no such change. I would expect the volume to go down a bit and stay relatively high but stable for a while.

I might be wrong but I'd say it changes nothing...

You can change exchange in a matter of hours. The Chinese exchange volume just switched to other exchanges. It's not because Chinese government says "stop doing that" that Chinese actually stop.

I've been a little skeptical of Huobi and OKCoin's figures on their volume reporting for some time now (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=526939.msg5917687#msg5917687) and so have others (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=417463.0).  The problem is, it's not the easiest thing to verify.  Any exchange can in theory just pull a number from thin air, shuffle some funds around and it'll get published as fact.  LocalBitcoins, however, would be almost impossible to fake, since they don't operate in the same way as centralised exchanges, so it's certainly likely that the latest surge is legitimate and could be a natural backlash from people who either disagreed with intervention from the regulators, or needed to switch to P2P transactions if the other exchanges are proving difficult to trade on.  But we can't rule out the possibility that the other exchanges are just posting some big numbers so it looks like business as usual.  OKCoin still claim (http://www.cryptocoincharts.info/markets/graphicalComparison) to be doing more business than Bitfinex, Kraken and Poloniex, which sounds dubious considering the recent restrictions on OKCoin withdrawals.

I guess this whole thingy by the PBoC isn't too bad for Bitcoin.
The price of course drops when the People's Bank announces a new meeting with the big exchanges,
but on the other hand they are finding ways to make Bitcoin a legitimate in China and will on the long run end with a even broader userbase.

You cannot withdraw your coins from the exchange but i think that you can still trade with the coins you have in the exchange.What ever it is a dumb situation created by the largest exchanges in terms of bitcoin traded volume to halt peoples coins and their freedom. Is it really legal to hold someones money like that ,i really doubt that.

My question is when will the suspension on withdrawals be lifted and are they going to limit it once it has been lifted? Surely the government is a bit concerned with all the money going into bitcoin but that is counter productive in my opinion because that in turn may temporarily bring prices down but eventually push it up further, which could bring the value of yuan down.

you should get your facts straight.
the government has no concerns with money going into bitcoin, but they are concerned with money going into an unregulated place and used for laundering money there specially with the zero fees they used to have. and that is a big difference.

after PBoc investigation china exchanger volume transaction is down
because investigation not yet finish , this now still investigation and withdraw yuan in china exchanger suspended until one month, next month withdraw can open again, so many china people choose wait trading until can withdraw again

That will be the problem and concern with all the governments around the globe and what if every country comes up with regulation which would dent the growth of bitcoin in the name of fears of funding to terrorism and money laundering as these are the main points that any government would come up .

China will eventually become an irrelevant actor unless they stop fucking around and start accepting bitcoin oficially and supporting it, otherwise more and more miners will move from the country and the bitcoin capital will move too to bitcoin friendly places.

At the end of the day, the countries that ban bitcoin or otherwise encumber it will end up losing.

It is simple... the Chinese government wants to slow down capital flight by targeting Bitcoin exchanges and now people changed their method to

buy and sell bitcoins. They simply moved to another platform to continue what they were doing.  ;D .... Bitcoin will always find a way.... if they

block LocalBitcoin, another method will pop up in it's place... Bitcoin will not be stopped or slowed down.  ;D

From the way the Chinese government is going about it, the only sure thing I can see here is them being successful at stopping new entrants into the world of bitcoin from their end and not those who are already in it because the set of people who are already in it will always find away out in making their transactions whether the government likes it or not because where there is a will, there will surely be a way...

Yes, as China exchanges halt withdrawal for a while to improve their policies about anti money laundering and meet the PBoC demand.
But it seems strange if trading volume increase again while their exchanges had stopped withdrawal, unless they have allows it. They might just found another way through localbitcoin to trade bitcoin, that's why the volume increase again even though the price still stable for now.

What is happening is Chinese traders are don't trust centralized exchanges anymore and lost confidence in 'official' price.
Traders are waiting to see what will happen next, and meanwhile are using Bitfinex to determine bitcoin's price. 
They started to trade more on p2p exchange platforms, from what I read they mainly use services like Bitcoinworld and Bitpie.

interesting theory.
but i have never heard the names of those 2 platforms you mentioned, and with a quick search i don't think they are that popular.
and also mostly because P2P exchange services such as these two are usually with lots of problems and unattractive to traders which makes them unpopular.
although OTC trading always pushes people to these platforms i still think localbitcoins (the picture in OP) is the biggest one yet.

one thing that i find interesting about China these days and i think people aren't talking about it much is the fact that everything is frozen on their exchanges and they are practically out of the bitcoin market for the time being and we can see price is still up, strong and even rising.

right now it is 1024 and even with all the fluctuations we haven't seen any major dumping happen despite all the FUD that were claiming doomsdays.