apparently they plan to shut down small local exchanges that remained after the 2017 ban: https://cointelegraph.com/news/bitcoin-drops-below-73k-as-china-vows-to-dispose-of-exchanges

more than that, it sounds like they are planning to go after offshore exchanges too:

they would just be enforcing the ban they issued in 2017. all chinese exchanges of note already shut down or left the country, hence the emphasis on "local" (read: small) exchanges.

the chinese government always likes to send a message when they sense that bitcoin speculation is on the rise.

coincidence. the market had already topped out weeks before he made those comments. after a 350% rise this year, the market was bound to take a tumble, don't you think?


quit dreaming.

amazon has been offering this (at least in the USA) for a few years.

it's not that they can reinvest for higher rates. it's that their margins are much higher than 10% so they can afford to give 10% off. in exchange, they get to lock in the customer's money right now.

it also works as a marketing ploy. when people feel like they're saving money, they spend more.

you'd think so, but desperate companies act desperately sometimes.

it reminds me of full tilt poker in 2011. for many months, they were unable to process millions in incoming deposits, but they were crediting the deposits to player accounts to keep operations running smoothly. players figured out what was going on and started defrauding them on deposits because withdrawals were flowing fine. full tilt intended to find a payment processor who could collect all the deposits but in the meantime, the DOJ shut them down and revealed they were totally insolvent. the jig was up.

if not for pokerstars buying them out, full tilt players would have lost everything. sadly, i don't think anyone will be buying einstein exchange's toxic debt.....

bitcoin is a much higher risk / higher reward proposition. nascent and emerging markets always have much more growth potential than established markets. that's because they are more speculative and risky.

so to me, bitcoin isn't better or worse per se. it's just the best play to make if you have limited capital---the most bang for your buck in terms of potential ROI. i'd like to take some of those returns off the table in the next bull market and roll them into more conservative investments like gold and real estate. once you have more capital, it makes sense to diversify into lower risk markets.

this seems to be happening all over the world as governments hedge against future liquidity crises.

it goes hand in hand with their plans to launch a central bank coin too. prevent capital flight via cash and drive the population towards a surveillance-friendly digital currency---two birds with one stone!

WEX (and certainly BTC-E) were much bigger, so that might be why. this is also the first we've heard of the russian authorities targeting WEX. so if the FSB is truly coming after russian operators this way, it's possible they shook down yobit and we just don't know about it.

in fact, there were some (unconfirmed) rumors that moscow police arrested yobit's owner last year. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3054442.0

that's not surprising tbh. people kept painting the president's comments about "blockchain" as a huge about-face on bitcoin and cryptocurrencies and free markets. i am/was extremely skeptical about that. if anything, china is becoming increasingly anti-market and the government is actively cracking down on existing crypto markets. 

you can tell because major chinese companies are jumping in line---weibo banning posts about "blockchain" or "crypto trading" and alipay blocking bitcoin/crypto transactions. if the government were about to become bitcoin friendly, this shit wouldn't be happening.

my god, peter vessenes is still holding things up with his frivolous lawsuit?

as expected, the bankruptcy court saw right through his bullshit, denying his claim for billions. tbh i'm amazed the courts granted coinlab $4 million at all. and now vessenes is appealing for more---what a scumbag!

on the plus side, this means 145k bitcoins won't be recirculated into the supply yet. i assume some portion of those coins will be sold on the market once distributed, pushing prices down.

you're referring to money laundering. that only applies to concealing the source of illegally obtained money. snicker is laundering-agnostic and requires no interaction between participants, so there is no way for the other party to question/confirm whether funds were illegally obtained. the counterparty has therefore engaged in no crime.

this is specifically different from, for example, a centralized mixer that advertises their service for money laundering.

it's really a sign of a crisis of confidence. banks refusing to lend to one another to meet daily liquidity requirements is exactly what was happening during the 2008 crisis. it's certainly not a bailout, but it's ominous in terms of a potential financial crisis that could lead to bailouts.

i was wondering why my 1 satoshi/byte transaction from yesterday never confirmed. there's still 79 MB in the mempool at that price!

thank goodness for RBF. it looks like i only need to bump the fee to 2 satoshi/byte.

i figure he's been keeping a low profile because "time heals all wounds". at some point, he will probably resurface and engage in some kind of underhanded campaign like bitcoin XT or bitcoin classic again.

he doesn't have much to add at this point. bitcoin moved beyond gavin a long time ago.

encroached on? increased demand seems like a good problem to have, even if market demand is more volatile. the 2016-17 bull market was a massive boon for companies like NVIDIA and AMD.


that's true---if bitcoin price is consistently trending down. in that case, they are screwed no matter what. but bbc.reporter is right that a bullish bitcoin isn't enough to save a mismanaged company, especially as the manufacturing space gets increasingly competitive.

bitmain's IPO plans always felt like a cash grab to me. they are cashing out ASAP while they're still at the top.

that's what happens during consolidations. it's especially obvious in triangles---volume is totally dead by the end. that's one of the reasons i'm pretty sure $7296 was the bottom even though things look a little grim right now. that push to $10.5k was done on massive volume, the biggest since the june top.

on the contrary, the 2017 bubble took off after the chinese exchanges turned off the volumizer bots. they did so because the government was investigating them.

the chart actually makes it look like the fake volume was keeping a lid on the price throughout 2016. probably just a coincidence though.

huobi and okcoin were no more convincing than today's crop. people used to refer to their volume churning as "the volumizer" and everyone knew it was completely fake. on some days they did volume well into the millions of BTC on a single exchange. nobody bought that shit for a second lol. if you zoom out on the old bitcoinwisdom charts it's incredibly obvious when the volumizer was turned on and off:

but that's the most obvious approach if you follow their guidance to the letter. placing value on assets where markets don't exist yet is impossible anyway.

exchanges crediting forked coins---especially cases like bitstamp crediting bitcoin cash months after the fork---are gonna yield taxable income though.

are you referring to a mandatory arbitration clause? i know bitfinex has such a clause. it would be extremely difficult to go after bitfinex in the british virgin islands too. i think lots of exchanges write those into the user agreement, but whether those clauses are enforceable is another matter.

shady exchanges hide in shady jurisdictions. this is one reason why people are willing to pay such high fees on coinbase and gemini.