https://www.ccn.com/the-dark-side-of-becoming-the-next-bitcoin/

Your favorite altcoin’s path to becoming the “next Bitcoin” is a lot more treacherous than you think.

The CEO of uPlexa (UPX) told CCN.com about the financial and ethical minefield faced by upstart altcoin projects in the cryptocurrency industry. Kyle Pierce – the project’s co-founder and lead developer – paints a miserable picture of an industry that may already have been taken over by its worst people.

The “king-making” ability of centralized exchanges is no secret. The CEO of DigiByte (DGB) claims he was asked for $300,000, plus 3% of his 58th ranked altcoin’s entire coin supply, to get listed on Binance.

The demands made of the 1,371st-ranked uPlexa were equally outrageous. According to Pierce:

    We’ve had offers for 50% of the premine to get listed on an exchange. 50% of our premine that’s allocated to exchange listings, marketing, hiring, founding team, core members, security audits, etc. They somehow believe that one hour of their time is worth nearly 6,000+ of our current man hours into this project.

Pierce says the saturation of centralized exchanges is making matters worse. Over 1,500 exchanges now compete for the same territory. As that number increases, the desperation of each rises accordingly.

    There’s 1500+ centralized exchanges that offer the exact same service, and they’re starting to lose volume. So they artificially boost the volume and hire VA’s to go around soliciting every team member of every project in hopes to quickly make a quick buck before their watering hole dries up.

These exchanges have become a choke-point for the cryptocurrency industry. The only way to get listed is to play their game. That means new cryptocurrency projects have their development plans dictated to them before they’ve even begun.

    For projects who did not participate in the IEO/ICO stages and have no funding, it is nearly impossible to get listed on an exchange. So, firstly, not only are people predominantly trading on centralized exchanges in a decentralized area, but the exchanges that are making huge sums of money are killing off the potential for real-world technologies to get noticed/adopted.

Another exchange told Pierce they would be happy to list his project, if only they moved away from “the whole privacy thing.”

There is a lot more in that article about the perils of launching a coin.

The only solution it seems to me, is to build a community and then get that community to use a decentralised exchange. The only reason Dex's arn't being used is because there isn't volume there - but that can be solved if an entire community decides to use a particular Dex.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-11-05/venezuela-is-now-more-than-50-dollarized-study-finds

Venezuela’s economy is increasingly dollarized, with more than half of retail transactions now being carried out in U.S. currency, a study found.

An estimated 54% of all sales in Venezuela last month were in dollars, according to a survey by Econoalitica, a Caracas-based research firm.

In Maracaibo, the country’s second-largest city, about 86% of all transactions took place in dollars, according to the study. The city has been one of the worst hit by blackouts, which has rendered credit card readers useless for days on end.

As Venezuela has become dollarized, inflation has come down. Even their idiot president Maduro admits the dollarization (which was done by citizens spontaneously ignoring their govt's ban on dollars) is a good thing.

A year ago, some of us were hoping that Venezuelans would have adopted bitcoin as their currency (or an alt). But the rolling electricity blackouts not only mean you can't use credit cards, but you can't use cryptocurrency. So they've gone with old fashioned US dollars in cash.

This whole real life case study shows that cryptocurrency won't get adopted in poor countries (because of lack of electricty). It will get adopted in rich countries - rich regulated countries.

[It should also be noted that fewer than 10 businesses ever used the Ohio system.]

https://thenextweb.com/hardfork/2020/01/17/new-hampshire-bill-to-allow-taxes-to-be-paid-in-bitcoin-falls-short/

No, New Hampshire residents won’t be able to pay their taxes in Bitcoin  or cryptocurrency.

Public records show that a bill filed this time last year, which would allow government agencies to accept digital assets for tax payments, has been shuttered.

Had the plans gone ahead, the US state of New Hampshire would have theoretically been ready to begin accepting tax payments in cryptocurrency after July this year.

Last November, the General Court’s Executive Departments and Administration Committee voted in favor of ending the bill. The decision was further backed with a verbal vote earlier this month, The Block reports.

Legislators in New Hampshire have been trying to get the state to accept cryptocurrency for tax payments since 2015. But the bill has continually come up against resistance from the state’s broader administration.

It seems that the bill‘s creators, representatives Dennis Acton and Michael Yakubovich, were more keen on making New Hampshire the first state to accept crypto for tax payments than actually offering a service that residents are demanding.

Back in August 2018, Hard Fork reported that Ohio became the first US state to accept Bitcoin for taxes. The website OhioCrypto.com was set up to facilitate the 23 different types of tax payment.

However, in October last year, Ohio treasurer Robert Sprague claimed that because OhioCrypto.com was operating as a “financial transaction device,” its backend provider — in this case BitPay — should have been chosen through a competitive tender process.

Sprague said that BitPay’s selection may have happened unlawfully. Ohio subsequently suspended its cryptocurrency tax payment service.

It should also be noted that fewer than 10 businesses ever used the Ohio system. It’s unlikely that anyone in New Hampshire will be left wanting.

This is why cryptocurrency is not getting anywhere. What is the point of legislators doing loads of work to get a payment method on the books, as in Ohio, if only 10 businesses bother to use it?

We're going backwards partly because people are hoarding their cryptocurrency instead of using it.

https://www.coindesk.com/10m-bitcoins-havent-moved-in-more-than-a-year-highest-since-2017

About 10.7 million bitcoins haven’t moved in more than 12 months, according to Digital Assets Data, a fintech company building crypto data feeds.

Considering the total number of bitcoins in circulation is 18.14 million, this also means nearly 60 percent of the coins remained dormant and only 40 percent participated in the price action seen in 2019. The percentage of bitcoins lying dormant for over a year is at its highest level since early 2017.

“The sheer size of unmoved bitcoin is definitely a sign of the developing community of HODLers,” Kadan Stadelmann, chief technology officer at Komodo Platform, told CoinDesk. 

The top cryptocurrency witnessed substantial swings last year, rising from $3,693 to $13,879 in the first six months only to fall back to $7,179 by mid-December. Thus, bitcoin just about doubled last year despite the brutal sell-off in the second half.

Even so, a large number of bitcoins remained inactive, possibly because investors are expecting a significant price rise following the mining reward halving, due in May. The process, repeated every four years, reduces block rewards by half in order to keep inflation under check.

However, if the market doesn’t live up to lofty expectations, some selling could be seen, Stadelmann said. In that case, the sum of bitcoins lying dormant would drop.

I think the rise from around $3,300 to $7,500 in 2019 was definitely people accumulating in anticipation of the halving.

Watch for rapid sales though as bitcoin reaches it's price targets.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-50924494

YouTube has reinstated hundreds of crypto-currency related channels after admitting it had removed them "in error".

A wave of YouTubers received notifications that their videos were in breach of the platform's terms of service earlier this week.

The move appeared to target smaller channels and publishers that focused on Bitcoin and crypto-currency content.

The Google-owned video sharing platform has since apologised for the mistake.

YouTube said in a statement that it had "made the wrong call" and confirmed that any content mistakenly removed would be restored.

"With the massive volume of videos on our site, sometimes we make the wrong call," it said.

"When it's brought to our attention that a video has been removed mistakenly, we act quickly to reinstate it."

It said there had been no changes to its polices, and insisted there would be "no penalty" to any channels that were affected by the incident.

Despite the apologies, I still think bitcoin video enthusiasts should migrate to decentralised video hosting sites like D tube: https://d.tube/

https://www.coindesk.com/hanukkah-reflections-on-my-year-of-toying-with-bitcoin

I spent 2019 trying a variety of products and services to test how easy it is to actually use cryptocurrency. I ran a Casa bitcoin-lightning node, used decentralized exchanges (DEXs), moved bitcoin from mobile apps to a hardware wallet (a Ledger) then transacted straight from the hardware wallet.

Beyond just running the node, I used the Casa device to send invoices for a small product (a poetry book) to learn more about the challenges independent merchants might face. Lastly, I set up a BTCPay store, which is the stage of this experiment I’ll end the year on.

And after a year of educational tinkering what is my takeaway?

It’s this: There’s no way this technology is ready for prime time.

It's worth reading the entire article because they go into a lot of detail of exactly what goes wrong.

IMO there is too much cheerleading in the bitcoin space, and not enough attention to sorting out the issues needed to make bitcoin succeed.

[Coinfloor’s decision suggests that nurturing a team with the specific expertise to follow the technical trials and tribulations of coins like ethereum may be too expensive for smaller crypto players, particularly if this constitutes only a small part of their trading volume.]

Here is the news from Coinfloor (UK exchange):

https://www.coindesk.com/uks-oldest-crypto-exchange-to-delist-ethereum-and-focus-solely-on-bitcoin

Coinfloor, the U.K.’s longest-running cryptocurrency exchange, plans to delist ethereum next month, citing an unclear future of hard forks and the need for onerous technical support for the second-biggest coin by market capitalization.

The company will also delist bitcoin cash, the splinter currency founded two years ago in the aftermath of bitcoin’s heated scaling debate. Starting Jan. 3, Coinfloor will support only bitcoin, whose eleventh anniversary happens to fall on that day.

The plan comes ahead of the launch of ethereum 2.0, tentatively planned for early 2020, which will begin the process of shifting the network away from the energy-consuming proof-of-work (PoW) consensus mechanism to proof-of-stake (PoS).

Coinfloor’s decision suggests that nurturing a team with the specific expertise to follow the technical trials and tribulations of coins like ethereum may be too expensive for smaller crypto players, particularly if this constitutes only a small part of their trading volume.

From the point at which it starts next year, ethereum’s platform upgrade “could take years to complete,” said Obi Nwosu, founder and CEO of Coinfloor. The complexity of the operation “means for a period of time there could be two versions of ethereum running.”

According to some ethereum developers, it’s likely to be years before the old ethereum PoW chain is fully merged into the new PoS network, leading to current discussions around ways to create a secure bridge between the two chains.

Developers really love doing all these forks - but they are a massive nuisance for everyone else. The exchanges, the online wallet providers, the payment processors, all of them have to do a shedload of work to accomodate these changes.

That's why I think coins that don't change much (bitcoin, doge) will end up being the winners. People just want something that works smoothly and that you don't need to do a lot of work to maintain, so that they can focus on the eco-system around the coin.

[despite specific State Department warnings]

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-11-29/cryptocurrency-expert-charged-with-aiding-north-korea

The U.S. arrested an Ethereum Foundation cryptocurrency scientist and charged him with helping North Korea use blockchain technology “to evade sanctions and launder money.”

Virgil Griffith, 36, was arrested Thursday at Los Angeles International Airport and charged with conspiring to evade U.S. sanctions against the regime of dictator Kim Jong-un, according to a statement from Manhattan U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman. Griffith, a U.S. citizen who lives in Singapore, attended a blockchain and cryptocurrency conference in Pyongyang in April, despite specific State Department warnings.

“Griffith provided highly technical information to North Korea, knowing that this information could be used to help North Korea launder money and evade sanctions,” Berman said in a statement Friday. He “jeopardized the sanctions that both Congress and the president have enacted to place maximum pressure on North Korea’s dangerous regime.”

Griffith was the subject of a 2008 New York Times Magazine profile that described him as a “cult hacker” and dubbed him the “Internet Man of Mystery.“ He worked with programmer and activist Aaron Swartz to develop Tor2web, which allows dark-web sites to be viewed on a standard internet browser. On his Linkedin profile, Griffith, a California Institute of Technology Ph.D., says he moved to Singapore in 2015 because he “concluded the best place for new growth” is Asia.

He has tweeted about North Korea a number of times in the past year. On June 29, he opined that emerging multinational standards on cryptocurrency regulations would create “a market opportunity” for the isolated regime to launch an exchange. In August, he tweeted a picture of his visa to visit North Korea.

Though the charges were filed in New York, Griffith is scheduled to first appear in federal court in Los Angeles sometime Friday.

I don't know what he was thinking. If they warned him in advance, and he still went to North Korea, then he's a prize idiot.

This kind of behaviour brings cryptocurrency into disrepute.

https://beincrypto.com/coinbase-holds-a-whopping-966230-bitcoin-7b-in-cold-wallet/

According to recent reports, Coinbase has a whopping 966,230 Bitcoin in its cold wallet. The exchange is increasingly becoming like a ‘bank’ which stores a growing number of deposited cryptocurrency assets.

Other exchanges lag behind Coinbase, but still have sizeable cold wallets from its depositors and own funds. BitMEX has around 265,140 BTC ($1.94B) while Bitstamp comes in third with 229,490 BTC ($1.67B). Other top exchanges by assets under its custody are Bitfinex (146,120 BTC), Kraken (136,780 BTC), Bittrex (131,340 BTC), and Coincheck (35,090 BTC)

.

I'm not sure they should be advertising this. I just hope they have really really FIERCE security and are guarding their stash like hawks.

https://news.bitcoin.com/canadian-regulator-green-lights-bitcoin-fund-ipo/

Crypto-focused Canadian investment fund manager 3IQ Corp. announced on Thursday that it has filed a preliminary prospectus for the IPO of The Bitcoin Fund. More importantly, the prospectus dated Nov. 27 has been receipted by the Ontario Securities Commission (OSC) after previously rejecting it. The IPO will offer two classes of units at $10 each.

The Bitcoin Fund is a closed-end investment fund established as a trust under Ontario’s laws, the company explained, adding that “the units will be an eligible qualified investment for registered investment accounts.” The fund’s investment objectives are to provide investors with long-term capital appreciation and exposure to bitcoin and its daily price movement in USD, the announcement details.

In other words this is a listed investment trust devoted to bitcoin.

Now we wait to see if all the hedge funds and so on decide to buy shares to get exposure to bitcoin in a regulated way.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/21/new-bill-would-make-facebooks-cryptocurrency-a-security-under-the-law.html

A new bill called the “Managed Stablecoins are Securities Act of 2019” would make Facebook’s libra cryptocurrency a security under the law.

A bipartisan team of representatives introduced the bill on Thursday, which could bring greater regulation to Facebook’s libra if passed.

The legislation follows Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s October hearing in front of the House Financial Services committee. One of the representatives introducing the bill said she was “disappointed” with his answers during the testimony.

Two members of the House Financial Services Committee, Reps. Sylvia Garcia, D-Tex., and Lance Gooden, R-Tex., proposed the “Managed Stablecoins are Securities Act of 2019” on the day of a committee hearing on the role of big data in financial services. Garcia explicitly called out libra in a statement announcing the bill, saying that it and other managed stablecoins “are clearly securities under existing law.”

Once it is a security it is subject to all the regulations that govern securities.

Most importantly, it would be regulated by American authorities (not Swiss as Facebook wanted) if any American used Libra.

The European Central Bank has long had negative interest rates of -0.5% charged to banks that keep their excess reserves at the central bank. The thinking is that this will discourage banks from holding excess reserves and they will instead lend the money out.

Unfortunately, not only are the banks continuing to hold excess reserves, they have now decided to charge their customers negative interest rates to make up the losses:

https://cointelegraph.com/news/german-bank-boosts-bitcoin-negative-interest-rates-hit-every-account

According to multiple local press outlets including the Süddeutsche Zeitung on Nov. 19, the Volksbank Raiffeisenbank Fürstenfeldbruck (VRF) in Northern Bavaria is now charging 0.5% negative interest rates on the smallest deposits.

“We had to do it,” the publication quoted the bank’s management as saying.

The reason, they said, was the cost of “parking” money at the European Central Bank (ECB).

In Germany, negative interest rates previously impacted only deposits above €100,000, which constituted an interest-free allowance. VRF’s move makes it the first lender in the country to target savings below that level.

“Recently, more clients have been coming to us from other banks where they’ve already used up their allowance,” the management continued.

If you were a customer in this situation why would you continue to hold money at a bank? Remember that inflation is positive in Germany, so a negative interest rate at the bank combined with inflation in the economy means your wealth gets eroded fast. Better to hold stocks, bonds, real estate or bitcoin.

According to the Financial Times:

https://www.ft.com/content/eb3fce1c-0a80-11ea-b2d6-9bf4d1957a67

Fidelity has been granted a trust licence to offer trading and custody of bitcoin by the New York State Department of Financial Services, as the asset management group continues to woo cautious institutional investors into the “Wild West” of digital assets.

The move allows Fidelity’s new digital assets subsidiary to launch a digital currency custody and execution platform “on which institutional investors and individuals can securely store, purchase, sell, and transfer bitcoin” to New York residents, the DFS said.

Boston-based Fidelity, which has about $2.8tn of assets under management, made clear last year it intended to take the plunge to offer digital assets services to Wall Street, where other regulated groups have held back from the nascent marketplace.

This is potentially huge. Fidelity has a lot of existing customers who use their online investment services - so making it easy for this group to trade bitcoin may mean a lot of new money entering the bitcoin space.

This is an 18 page report by PriceWaterhouseCoopers:

https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/financial-services/fintech/assets/pwc-elwood-2019-annual-crypto-hedge-fund-report.pdf

It has a number of gems within: there are a 150 active crypto hedge funds. Most have AuM (assets under management) of about $22 million.

They use various different strategies - in 2018 a lot of them invested in ICOs and lost money (though some made money by exiting these early). They're not just focused on bitcoin, they look at alts and bitcoin related start-up service companies too.

Have a look at the following graphic:



The image comes from the following tweet:

https://twitter.com/CryptoWelson/status/1190094660578037761/photo/1

Demand for #Bitcoin in economically volatile regions reached record highs in 2019.

Since 2013, volumes on Argentine peso, Hong Kong dollar, and Venezuelan bolivar bitcoin pairs have exceeded $600 billion in total value.

I wonder whether the surge in the bitcoin price that started in March/April is correlated with the Hong Kong riots which started on 31st March 2019 and are still ongoing.

https://www.newsbtc.com/2019/10/30/bitcoin-trades-at-large-premium-in-argentina-as-dollar-purchase-restrictions-set-in/

Bitcoin is trading at a large premium on cryptocurrency exchanges in Argentina. Demand remains high after the nation’s central bank announced a further tightening of a limit on the number of dollars an individual can purchase from it each month.

The policy essentially forces the people of Argentina to either sink of swim in an economy with a less than perfect track record. Well, it would, were it not for Bitcoin.

According to data taken from local cryptocurrency exchange Ripio, Bitcoin is trading at a large premium in Argentina. Whereas Coinmarketcap has the price of the leading digital asset at around $9,150 at the time of writing, Bitcoin is currently selling at the South American trading venue for ARS$633,862 ($10,578).

The nation has been in the grips of successive economic crises which have seen the value of the peso plummet. In an attempt to stabilise the currency, the central bank first limited the amount of dollars an individual could purchase each month to $10,000 in September. Just days ago, it drastically increased this restriction to just $100 in physical bank notes per month.

I guess the workaround is buying bitcoin and then taking a trip to another country where you can cash out in dollars using local bitcoins.

Bitcoin and cryptocurrency in general will only advance if people actually use it for more than speculation.

In the past we've seen lots of retailers enabling bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies in their checkouts, and then been disappointed that hardly anyone has used the function. And we have had some orgs like Steam disabling bitcoin and giving up on it.

So how many people on here have actually used cryptocurrency in real life?

I'll start: I haven't used bitcoin (because I consider that savings), but I have used dogecoin to buy gift cards and bitcoincash (BCH) to deposit to a betting website via BitPay.

Anyone else want to share their experiences?

https://www.coindesk.com/trump-administration-popped-2017-bitcoin-bubble-ex-cftc-chair-says

The Trump administration acted to deflate the bitcoin bubble of 2017 by allowing the introduction of futures products, a former official said Monday.

Christopher Giancarlo, who left the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) at the end of his five-year term as chairman in April, told CoinDesk in an interview:

    “One of the untold stories of the past few years is that the CFTC, the Treasury, the SEC and the [National Economic Council] director at the time, Gary Cohn, believed that the launch of bitcoin futures would have the impact of popping the bitcoin bubble. And it worked.”

In a speech at the Pantera Summit in San Francisco on Monday, Giancarlo elaborated further, saying bitcoin’s dramatic price run-up in December 2017 was the first major bubble following the 2008 financial crisis. That’s why the Trump administration acted in concert to address it in a pro-markets manner, he said.

Bitcoin futures listed by the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) and the CBOE Futures Exchange (CFE) were announced by the CFTC on Dec. 1, 2017 and went live on Dec. 18. Bitcoin’s price peaked at nearly $20,000 one day earlier, on Dec. 17, before falling dramatically in subsequent weeks.

“We saw a bubble building and we thought the best way to address it was to allow the market to interact with it,” Giancarlo told the crowd gathered at the Ritz-Carlton on Nob Hill.

Of course, there are different views on what ultimately brought bitcoin prices back down to Earth, reaching lows in the $3,000 range in late 2018. However, Giancarlo cited research by the San Francisco Federal Reserve that also credits the introduction of bitcoin futures for reining in a market driven by optimists.

Without shorts, a market has no pessimists. “If you do believe it’s a ridiculous price but you don’t own, there’s no way to express that view,” Giancarlo told CoinDesk, adding:

    “If you don’t have that derivative, then all you’ve got are believers [and] it’s a believers’ market.”

The lack of easy ways to short has been cited by other researchers as propping up prices in other crypto assets.

“The CFTC staff handled it strictly on procedural grounds, but at the leadership level I communicated with Treasury Secretary [Steven] Mnuchin and NEC Director Gary Cohn, and we believed that, should bitcoin futures go forward, it would allow institutional money to bring discipline to the value of the cash market,” Giancarlo told CoinDesk. “And that’s exactly what happened.”
Lessons from ’08

The bitcoin bubble of 2017 must be viewed in the context of the financial crisis of 2008, Giancarlo said.

In 2008, the former regulator was running GFI Group Inc., an over-the-counter trading desk on Wall Street that became one of the largest exchanges for credit-default swaps – the financial instrument that wreaked havoc on U.S. markets.

Giancarlo said:

    “Coming out of the 2008 financial crisis, the legit criticism of regulators was along the lines of: Where were they during the expansion of the real estate mortgage bubble, and why didn’t they take steps to pop that bubble when they could have?”

That view informed regulators acting quickly on bitcoin’s ascent, he added.

To Giancarlo, the lesson was clear: Regulators mustn’t be complacent when faced with a bubble – but they must act in a way that keeps markets free. In the case of 2017, permitting bitcoin futures presented just such an opportunity.

Giancarlo concluded:

    “I believe it shows the power of markets to bring discipline to prices.”

He's not wrong.

It was the ability to short that forced the prices back down.

The sad thing is I remember the bitcoin community being so excited when the Chicago Futures Exchange introduced bitcoin futures. They were even calling Giancarlo "crypto-dad".

Facebook's Libra was really aimed at the remittence market (which is why they proposed a stablecoin).

It's worth looking at other attempts of cryptocurrencies to break into the remittence market, and George Harrap, the CEO of Bitspark (Hong Kong based remittence company) did a useful assessment of the viability of different coins:

https://blockgeeks.com/news/bitcoin-outruns-ripple-at-global-remittances-says-new-report/

The biggest issue is liquidity:

There are no liquid Nigerian naira (NGN) and Ethereum (ETH) market, EOS and Vietnamese dong or XRP and Philippine peso markets,” Harrap observes. “The only market which has sufficient liquidity and people willing to provide a local currency in exchange for a cryptocurrency is usually bitcoin.”

Ripple, which was the stablecoin that was supposed to be ideal for remittences seems to be a failure because you can only convert it to bitcoin and USD:

The report notes that Western Union has trialed Ripple’s products, but have steered clear of xRapid, the solution which uses XRP. The report states, this is because “there is not enough liquidity, depth, nor enough on-ramps and off-ramps for it to work as intended.”

The majority of remittance payments are sent to developing countries, whose currencies lack liquid markets with XRP. Bitcoin, on the other hand, has been out there for a long time and has more market approval along with some level of regulatory recognition.

Bitcoin also supports direct exchanges to almost all the local currencies. Even though there are approximately 20 tokens that provide support for remittances, they have all failed to establish reliable liquidity channels with smaller fiat currencies.

As of February 2019, 99.9% of all cryptocurrency money transfers are in Bitcoin.

The only problem with bitcoin is the fees and the delays when the price rises and the mempool gets backlogged.

If a coin can appear with low fees and no backlogs, and if that coin takes over the remittence business, it should have a good chance to make a breakthrough as the dominant crypto. Zuckerberg was hoping that coin would be Libra, but that dream is dead now.

The latest attempt features Alipay (payment processor):

https://cointelegraph.com/news/official-alipay-to-ban-all-bitcoin-related-transactions

Alipay, the digital payment arm of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, has declared that it will be banning any transactions related to Bitcoin (BTC) and other cryptocurrencies.

On Oct. 10, Alipay reiterated its anti-crypto stance in a Twitter thread, which warned that the company is closely monitoring over-the-counter transactions to identify irregular behavior and ensure compliance with relevant regulations. Alipay wrote:

    “If any transactions are identified as being related to bitcoin or other virtual currencies, @Alipay immediately stops the relevant payment services.”

This move follows various reports that Alipay is being used for BTC transactions.

Binance uses Alipay for buying crypto

On Oct. 9, major crypto exchange Binance confirmed on Twitter that it has begun accepting fiat currencies through online payment service Alipay and mobile messaging and payment app WeChat.

Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao, also known as CZ, clarified that the exchange is not working directly with WeChat or Alipay, and users are still able to use them for peer-to-peer transactions.

This announcement followed the implementation of Binance’s peer-to-peer trading for Bitcoin, Ether (ETH) and Tether (USDT) against the Chinese yuan (CNY) earlier, as reported by Cointelegraph.

I think what has happened is this: China closed down all the cryotocurrency exchanges back in early 2017.

Then Binance tweeted to their Chinese users that they could buy bitcoin with Alipay. The Chinese authorities then put pressure on Alipay to close down any bitcoin related transactions, which is what they've done.