Legendary member d5000 has made simple suggestions for the ordinary Chinese people in how to earn some cryptocoins in case their government also bans mining for them. The solution is to rent out your extra storage space or home mining with your hard drives. The electricity costs will be much lower than the usual way of using GPUs and CPUs for mining.
I am reaching out to the Chinese people. Please do not give up on the cryptospace. It is not giving up on you.
I was curious about methods to "buy" BTC without going through the standard procedures of "buying BTC with fiat" or "mining".
HD storage space is one of the things that can be most easily changed to BTC in a nearly-anonymous way*. There are three cryptocurrencies I know that allow to change storage space directly into a token you can change easily to BTC at an altcoin exchange: Sia, Storj and Burst.Read the whole thread https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1793028.msg17877486Read the blog that maybe inspired d5000 http://cryptomining-blog.com/7392-building-a-multi-terabyte-storage-solution-for-mining-and-sharing/