If you actually listened to me and expected further dip in the 3 days following 28th, you are rewarded.

BTER, an exchange operated in Canada targetin Chinese (they don't even have English version) and has Chinese bank accounts, is the first to stop charging (deposite) completely (others were talking about BtcTrade, another exchange, which stopped online deposite only. Bter is the first to stop deposite in any form).

Their announcement is here (chinese only):
https://bter.com/article/402

What interests me, is why BTER? There are 15 bitcoin exchanges on the PBOC's ban list, BTER is a much less known one. A wild guess is that banks somehow informed or invited exchanges for a talk, to give order without publicity - typical Chinese government's way - and those who are not available are banned out right to get the owner come out and talk.

I speculate the following: when BTC dip, if LTC price drops against BTC price on Chinese exchanges, Chinese are being bearish. Otherwise the USD world is.

That's because LTC endorsement is phenomenal in China, and LTC investors are more risk-seeking and twitchy (over-react to both bearish and bullish trend). If this is correct, in the 3-days down-ward move, the last Friday's downward pressure is from China (LTC/BTC dipped to 0.265), and this weekends' pressure is from USD world (LTC/BTC remain on 0.0278).

The chance of PBOC (central bank of China) closing exchanges' bank account, is built into the price at 530$. Lower dip is due to Chinese scared the world. (Of course there will be another crash when PBOC actually does it.) Should I laugh seeing panic sellers as stupid as our homebrew (China) version?

Now stop insult our intelligence by putting a lot of exclaimation mark and "LOL" everywhere. I hope there is a troll tamer in this sub-forum. I write the following for others who might be misguided.

Sina is a news-feed, people don't really seriously source them. Its report carries no weight here. Caixin's record has been clearner than most other financial media in this country (excluding HK). Bobby Lee's record is empty, untested, and he has a stake (i.e. tends to be biased). What remain questionable is, since Caixin confirmed the order exists, why it is not executed or press-released. The market price indicate that people expect a high chance the orders to be executed some time in the future - even if not 15th, the intention of the master is revealed. (Yes, the word 'master' is used to contrast 'slave', helps you grasp an idea of China fast.) 99% of the time, the market knows more than you do, i.e. market price contain all information available. Remember when price in MtGox meant odds being 3 to 1 that MtGox go insolvent? A lot are saying like you do, that there are no solid proof of MtGox's problem, and MtGox CEO says it is okay. It turns out the (information contained in the price of) market was right, those who bet against it, wrong.

If the order is executed, it means game-over for most Chinese exchanges, no one would remember Bobby Lee's lousy prediction. If the order is not executed, Bobby Lee gets reputation. You would have one choice only, if you put on his shoes.

Do you remember the smart salesman who sell life-protecting amulet on a ship in peril? If the ship sinks, who will go after him for a refund? And note the fact that the market responded nothing to Bobby Lee's speech.


P.S. You misquoted "People's Bank of China" to "Bank of China". They are very different.

The reason that market did not respond (in fact, faltered a bit) after his speech is: 1) he stated he didn't represent PBOC in this speech; 2) he gave 9 bullet points on Internet Finance industry, this is only one of them; and 3) in January he promptly spoke of three 'red line' that PBOC is to respond, one of them is "people's rainy day saving being invested in Internet based financing sheme" (吸收公众存款的红线), which is what Bitcoin intends to be - ironically enough, Bitcoin intendted to protect PBOC (central bank) pouring rain on people.

That speech is less credable than the recently revealed-but-not-executed plan to cleanse 15 bitcoin exchanges' bank account.

Is this arrogance a sign of denial? The fact is, Bitcoin has already shown vulnerable in the fact of such news. Do you call dipping 35% resiliency? (Last time they banned online payment services to facility bitcoin trading, 18th Dec 2013, bitcoin dipped 35% in price.) It has been 4 months, and bitcoin never truly recovered from 18th Dec 2013's PBOC ban - do you call that resilience? (You may argue it would be recovered if without MtGox though). Ignoring the attitude of the biggest financial institute in the world look like denial to me.

Each time China 'ban' bitcoin, the market responses signal very clear message to PBOC (People's Bank of China) that they are the king, and they don't even care about the crown - many in China actually marvelled why this SINGLE entity that has the most financial assets of any single public finance institution in HISTORY should even bother to talk about Bitcoin. Me too, thinking the issue is too trivial for PBOC. PBOC can buy up the total market cap of bitcoin half a million times - you deserve 0.0002% of their attention. And there are people commenting that PBOC is too trivial for BITCOIN! If majority of the bitcoin holders are indeed so ignorant, I would not expect them actually to hold a bottomline: you can't rely on a child's promise, 'cos when they learn more they will change their mind.

PBOC revealing the possibility to ban or hinting so would cause market to respond according to its wish, and they don't even bother to have such a wish. PBOC have no interest on the market price of Bitcoin, only its existance.

And consider China's population and size, having China in the game or not is going to influnce bitcoin development and thus your speculative position. I am not saying China having a good or bad impact, only that ignoring China in whole is silly, childish, naïve.

Do you live in your own dream?

Whenever something you don't like happens, you remove it from the picture, soon you end up a coterie.

You don't have to cut down the whole internet. Currently around half of the access to non-Chinese websites times out or get reset, people seems to be fine with it. Xin-Jiang has been cut away from the Internet for many months and people are fine with it. China is a country of huge population, we are fine with only our (controlled) information there. Facebook wasn't usable in China, very few Chinese complain about that in Chinese (Complaints in English doesn't count, insignificant).

The ban was too detailed to be rumor. There is a possiblity that the execution was halted due to meida exposure, but I won't buy the idea that it being FUD. Elaborate rumors doesn't work in China, rumor should be in a decicive, clear tone and extremely short.

The purpose "to prevent influx of illegal workers" is clear, but who rules is not clear to me. My permission to visit HK was issued by Chinese  border control, not by Hong Kong's - they do have one too, which issues VISA instead of "Permission". If I have a VISA from them - as many rich Chinese has for using HK as panic room - I can also use that to enter HK, but they don't issue VISA to Chinese for short visits, in which case they would ask Chinese to get a "Permission" from his own mainland government instead. The difference is not really important, because of the following:


Sure true.

But even that (the resident card) is not yet a HUKOU.

It's a bit confusing whichever way I put it. My Resident Card says Xiamen, but if I want to get HUKOU in Xiamen, hell, it is going to be difficult. This is because of the 'collective HUKOU' where I temperorily have a HUKOU in a city and have my resident card updated, but doesn't enjoy the full rights of the citizens there, and the HUKOU gets sent back to hometown in a few years when the collectiveness expires. Also the existance of 'temperory resident licence' for influx workers made it more complicated how to define residence. These are the documents bare similiar names but only HUKOU gives rights. I'll stick to HUKOU without trying to translate it then, and fall back to 'residency' occassionally.

If you are a citizen of a big city, you can get a permission to visit HK (a big city's citizenship is damn hard to get, estimated 100,000USD for one BEIJING citizenship in average cost of efforts. Citizenship, called HUKOU, is vitally important  in China). If you are a citizen of a smaller place, you are allowed to go HK by joining a tour group, where the tour manager is supposely held responsible if you flee to a hidden corner in HK not coming back (in reality many tour group organizes one-memeber-groups for a fee to workaround the regulation). Hence you can organize a HK Bitcion tour, everybody go shopping in HK, shop for goods and coins. perfectly legal AFAIK.

Do you mean "Bitfinex operates out of China mainland, in Hong Kong; They are not affected by the Chinese Government."?

Because I always thought Bitfinex is a HK business, am I wrong?

A Chinese citizen can not purchase more than 50,000USD's worth of forieng currency like HKD in a year.

I maintained that CEOs of Chinese exchanges had nothing official - I never aruged against it. The arguement I am making is that the rumors are true, although various factor can influnce the execution. Then again, you only need to know the intention of PBOC - the general believe is PBOC wins every round.

This, I cannot solve, but I have a theory.

I am speculating that Exchange's CEOs (some of them know me but didn't establish business contact) are simply confused and waiting for their bank managers to tell them that the accounts will be closed soon, meanwhile making backup plans to move to HK. The bank managers, however, was told to hold, and wait for PBOC's new decision. PBOC is watching media and trying to sense if everybody are ready to accept the fate -> Yes = Go on as planned. No = Make new strategy with the same goal. PBOC has a history of clumsy PR management, they are learning it too, so it's hard to predict their move. Notice that this time PBOC started the action (last time 18th Dec 2013, 5-ministry co-operated) so they have more room to change strategy, nevertheless the intention is clear now.

Ha ha. "You know what I mean" again.

The internal notification was not for the public - I explained this point already. The plan was:

1. Issue this notfications, and let banks notify the exchanges. Bank manager "We ain't gonna work with you, and you know what I mean".
2. The exchanges announces that they can't operate. Putting blame to PBOC is extremely silly move, they should do so by saying "please take our your money back, we can't do business, you know what I mean."
3. People know what it means and cease trading, being aware that exchanges already lined up with PBOC.

Now talk about unharmony, there are so many unharmony things happening everyday! The way to reach harmoney is not to do justice, but to put off the fight, i.e. convert rage to sadness, resent to capitulation. A war can be prevented if both sides knows who wins in the end. Letting exchances announcing they can't do the business is a clear signal that the government had won before the war start.

The plan was good but the notification leaked, two times. The first time PBOC state it was fake, and the second time more details are revealed and Caixin says they confirmed it (though receiver of the notification or PBOC?). This puts PBOC in confronation to bitcoin. This was really unnecessary and un-harmony, not meant to happen, but PBOC won't fear the confrontation, thus the intention will be done.

The notification required closure of 15 companies' accounts, there will be less than 100 accounts to go, there are enough time. And I agree with you that the only thing in doubt is that deposite is still possible. But I will put wage on the professionalism of Caixin this time. That is, I think there are not much room to doubt - unless PBOC rewrite old decisions with new ones that not yet disclosed.

That statement is the backdrop of the precursor mini-crash.  PBOC stated they did not ban Bitcoin trade, hence the early reports are wrong, but Caixin's latest report says PBOC decided to force close the trade accounts of exchanges - hence this 2nd crash. So the ban is true, but incorrectly described, and now we have the correctly described version. PBOC childishly over-reacted to the incorrectly described internal ban, claiming it is fake, at the rage the ban disclosed to media so early.

As said, Caixin is the closet thing to "reputable" in China's financial sector. They said they confirmed it, I think hence there are little room to doubt.