What your comments suggest to me, Jorge, is that my initial reading of the December announcement was correct, and the consistent content of all the official statements of the PBoC confirm, that there is no prohibition on banking relationships with exchanges in China. The restriction is on banks taking on exposure to BTC, meaning they cannot have risk positions in BTC, nor can they denominate accounts in BTC.
As all the fear mongering is rendered foolish
Well, there have been at least four or five instances of banks closing the exchange accounts to deposits, confirmed by the exchanges themselves on their websites.
Curiously, Huobi had a note dated April 11 on their website reporting the account closures,
but they seem to have pulled it. The newest note there is dated April 10. They seem to be revamping their home page, and even the link to the latter seems to be gone.EDIT: the note is still there:
http://www.huobi.com/news/index.php?a=show_notice&id=308It
may be that the banks were over-reacting to some PBoC vague note, or to the Caixin article itself (although some of the closures were communicated to the exchanges well after the article came out). Or it may be that the exchanges
managed to convice some of the other banks.
One important point in Huobi's April 11 note, IMHO, was a paragraph which I understood as follows: "We believe that the goal of the PBoC's 'Strengtening the December decrees' circular was to combat money laudering and other crimes. We have done a lot in this regard and we are ready to cooperate with the authorities, hoping that we can reach a compromise that will let us keep the bank path open." Again. this makes me belive that the 'Strenghtening' circular saw by Caixin was not a PBoC decision but came from law enforcement and national security agencies.
EDIT:
我们认为，去年央行关于比特币的289文，是出于反洗钱和维护金融系统安全的考虑，更是对比特币行业在中国的发展提供了一个基础的政策方向和框架，火币网对此表示支持并且坚决执行相关规定。目前的交易方式是比较有利于相关部门监管的，因为包括火币网在内的几个大的交易平台在去年12月就启用了实名认证、资金来源检查、大宗可疑交易上报等机制。如果合法合规经营的在线交易平台停止服务，比特币交易将分流到无法监测的线下，让监管变得更加困难。
we believe the central bank last year, about 289 text bitcoin is considered for anti-money laundering and maintaining the security of the financial system , it is the Bitcoin industry development in China provides a basis for policy direction and framework , fire coins Network expressed strong support for and implementation of the relevant provisions . Current trading is more conducive to the relevant regulatory authorities , including the fire because the network , including several large currency trading platform in December last year on the real-name authentication , check the source of funds , the bulk of suspicious transactions reporting mechanisms enabled. If legal compliance online trading platform operated to stop the service , Bitcoin transactions will be diverted to the next line can not be monitored , so that regulation becomes more difficult.
the result may be that every auntie and grandmother in China buys a bitcoin for the baby. About 200 million out of perhaps 200,000 floating bitcoin.
The July bubble may be a second China bubble.
The December bubble will be the ETP bubble, and much larger.
Maybe...
Poll
