The Chinese government themselves have said there's no way they can ban Bitcoin so any citizen who buys, sells or owns it isn't breaking any law.

They have however made it extremely hard to buy or sell, even more so if they're blocking access to foreign exchanges too which looks possible. This is cleaner and cheaper than actually outlawing it.

So what the average Chinese person is going to face will be a major grind. There'll always be a small cross section of real believers. The rest will leave it alone and walk away which is exactly what the government wants.

If other countries decide they've had enough of crypto this is exactly how they'll do it too. Once exchanges are gone so is most of the audience.

You have enlightened yourself. Bitcoin will be a bit slower for a while if there isn't other machinery ready to take up the slack. That's it. That's the only practical effect there'll be and then after a few weeks it'll be fine.

The spiritual effect will be profound. Bitcoin from then on will be mined by people who actually know what it is and give a shit about it.

It may of course be utter rubbish, but let's say the Chinese government does block internet access to the blockchain itself.

As TOR seems very hit and miss there and VPNs are slowly being hunted to extinction what would be the options for a Chinese person who wanted to interact with it? Does the Blockstream satellite thing work?

It doesn't communicate in RL. Outside the institution they fit a spit hood to it.

This thought experiment has already partially occurred. That's exactly what Auroracoin did with the population of Iceland.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auroracoin

Its distribution was tied in with their national ID system.

I've no idea how you'd achieve it internationally as it would be a shocking mishmash of attempts at identification.

Unless you'd arrived in the last couple of months you would've had to have worked rather hard not to have huge profits by now. Overall I'm up plenty. I don't really ever want to sell and I never have. I'd much prefer to spend if there's a need for something and I don't give a shit if it's instantly converted, that's their problem.

It all depends on what your goals are and what your immediate needs are. No one should be going without something vital if they have profits to play with. Equally they'd be monumentally stupid to spend it all on Steam games.

The stars are only just beginning to align. If people can afford to then they should at least wait a few more years until after the next halving.

The market doesn't give a flying fuck who or what is mining Bitcoin. Some of the richest traders probably don't understand the slightest thing about how it works. It's supposed to be invisible, not central to everyone's perception.

The only effect will be an increase in the time between blocks until the next difficulty adjustment unless enough miners elsewhere pick up the slack.

It would be one of the single most bullish things that could happen to Bitcoin. Chinese mining has been a cancer.

There might no doubt be an attempt by the usual whales to initiate a dip, but it's less than nothing compared to the closure of the markets.

I'd go for this - https://www.amsterdamgold.com/en/homepage

They've recently added BTC and they've been around for ages.

That's the type of diligence and methodical thinking that makes me proud of the fine men and women who populate this forum. I'll look forward to Lauda live streaming the birth of her Bitcoin baby on here.

It reads like utter bilge to me. The price needs to be $1 million before anyone spends it? No one's going to spend a satoshi on the way up? I think he's a bit too in love with round numbers.

And for the record I don't think it's ever going to be a widely used currency. Most people will do all they can to avoid spending it if they have other types of money to hand.

Er, no. It means they're going to close and stay closed. There's been no mention of licensing or any interest in ensuring the survival of any exchange in China. The only fact shared is that they have to close. The reopening bit is pure conjecture and bollocks to boot.

December or a few minutes after you wrote that?

No one's going to be paying attention to Chinese prices from now on. They're doomed and they're irrelevant to the rest of the world. It'll be the same as pricing on Mt Gox as it was dying. That was hundreds of dollars below the functioning exchanges.

It'll make the case for Bitcoin that much stronger.

A centrally issued crypto, not that it'll have the same principles, would up their level of control to nightmarish proportions.

Right now regular currency is digital but it runs through a labyrinth of private banks, routers and obscure systems. With something crypto esque the central bank retains full control over absolutely every aspect.

They can inflate, deflate, shut down, devalue, debase, bail in, lock you out, all with the press of their one big red button after one meeting.

China's been a pestilence on Bitcoin. It wouldn't have had the price troughs, centralisation and power struggles if it had stayed a modest player. They've contributed nothing to development. The one time China was removed from the equation it eerily, or rather not eerily at all, went from $1000 to $5000. If the miners go then salvation is complete.

Let them come crawling back in the future once the rest of the world has shown them what's what.

Anyone who thinks Bitcoin has magically outgrown bubbles is off their tits. There will always be bubbles on the way to some sort of saturation. The question is have the bubbles massively slowed down, is BTC not in one at all yet or have they been outsourced to alts?

I well and truly thought alts were in a bubble but they themselves are amazingly steady considering how much they've risen. It's possible that the bubbling has been met equally by a large number of new users who've countered the exuberance.

So dunno is my answer.

I don't think there's one single country that has fully clarified their legal status, let alone regulated them.

It's going to take a while before any country comes out fully for them. China is now certainly against them and the US is starting to make rumbles about bringing them to heel.

If I was in the token business I would reject Chinese and American citizens and hope for the best. That's about all anyone can do.

You need to established yourself as a long standing presence here first. Do some trades, participate as a user in sig campaigns yourself.

There seem to be a lot of new campaigns around run by relative noobs, mainly ICOs and alts, so you could hustle in the alt section. It seems like a large amount of work to me.

I haven't seen anything beyond a couple of screenshots to suggest this has any truth at all.

I certainly won't be sad if it is true. It would be the Chinese government's final parting gift to us all.

I don't think we'd like how it will perform unless the next meltdown delays itself for a decade or two more.

I'd agree with that, I seem to remember the Ethereum Foundation completely screwing themselves because of that, but it shows a slight lack of sympathy for how weedy the XEM market is if they run straight to it and poo all over it.