Bitcoin is actually a total win in China. The point is not necessarily that people need to be able to freely buy with CNY on online exchanges. The reality is that Chinese miners have good access to ASICs, there is an infrastructure in place for in-person trading for cash, and all of that is totally legal and outside the regulatory purview of PBOC. They can still drive up the price without exchanges as we know them, because the intrinsic value proposition for the Chinese people is immense. A Chinese Bitcoin holder has what amounts to a Swiss bank account on steroids, which they can trade offshore for hard currency anytime they want. Merely holding these coins as a store of value exerts upward pressure on the price via the supply schedule.

This basically demonstrates that PBOC is really just taking the same position as every other central bank in the world.

Hashing is not a crime, payment fraud is. There are lots of existing statutes that cover those bases. Specifically legislating against 51% is a weird form of prior restraint on what is not actually a crime to begin with.

As for all this weird stuff about sociopaths and whatnot, I consider myself a Libertarian politically, but I have to admit I find that cringeworthy, as all that stuff misses the point just to have a big antigovernment circlejerk.

This is a point where I wish had some ASCII art of a facepalming handy.

I mean a lot of people who weren't before.

If we really do capitulate to $200 or lower, a lot of people are going to get crazy rich off this thing!

There is already a pretty comprehensible legal framework in place for dealing with these kinds of situations. The "crime" in a 51% attack is not simply having the hashing power, it's in committing fraud against a victim. There is nothing necessarily special about a 51% attack with respect to existing laws concerning payment fraud.

Classic script to a pump-and-dump.

I think China will be a factor in a future rally but in a completely different capacity than just driving price via exchange trading. The gradual encroaching restrictions have propelled huge expansion in mining as a substitute bitcoin acquisition method, and it's very possible this demographic is less inclined to sell for fiat as quickly as their western counterparts. The Chinese middle class has a LOT of savings with nowhere to make a return, and have both great access to ASIC mining hardware via individual purchase domestically and through investing in more professional ventures. It's very plausible that in the near future, a much lower percentage of mining supply will be sold on short timescales just for fiat, and a more hoarded supply necessarily leads to less resistance to upwards price pressure.

Of course, I'm "touchy" contradicting stuff you just made up out of thin air! It's not exactly helpful to the OP when literally everything you're saying is wrong.

It's also funny that you're trying to save face by claiming that this unit does scrypt.

There is no such thing as a "SHA256 connection" as opposed to stratum. They all use stratum, it's just that pools will use different server names / port numbers for scrypt coins versus Bitcoin mining.

So basically you're saying that your SHA256 ASIC miner didn't mine scrypt (by trying to connect to the "stratum multipool" on ghash.io). The OP's problem is nowhere near as ridiculous as what you're describing.

In principle they could, but it would require bureaucrats to stick their necks out to create rules that they have no incentive to create, that could come back and bite them in the ass, when offshore CNH trading already accomplishes the exact intention of any new rules.

It's 100% capital controls and nothing else.

Trading RMB for Bitcoin freely on exchanges is an unlimited circumvention of capital controls. Just that and no other reason requires PBOC to do something, unless we want to believe that all of a sudden PRC has completely rethought its position on capital flight.

It's a derivative. Even if you believe it's going to appreciate to that level, you still always bet on it depreciating as a form of insurance.

The interpretation here and on cex.io's page that the maintenance fee is in some way dependent on difficulty is complete and utter nonsense. Their cost is based on GH/s, and the cost to run and maintain any given amount of GH/s in Bitcoin is ONLY dependent on the BTC/USD exchange rate and nothing else.

Yes because your cost was already deducted against revenue in the first place. You're trying to double-deduct costs. Leaving out the income component of this situation gives a distorted picture exactly like what you described.

Capital gains is on the $100, because the fair market value establishes the basis.

Buying an actual S1 directly from Bitmain ends up being cheaper, and you get almost double the hashing power.

Everyone with that kind of income level is already well-below the cuttoff for qualifying to enroll in Medicaid, which arguably is absolutely horrific coverage, but enrollment in Medicaid satisfies the coverage mandate of the ACA.

Bitcoin wins overwhelmingly already because the zero confirmation adequately propagated transaction itself has orders of magnitude less reversal risk than any existing pull-style instrument. The 10-minute block targeting time is irrelevant to ordinary point of sale transactions.

Paypass is just a frontend for normal credit card backend systems and has all the counterparty and fraud risk of any other system of that
nature. These systems "verify" quickly, but the merchant does not actually securely have the money until a lot longer than ten minutes!