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China won't confiscate btc from exchanges, it is a robbery, and exchanges have own cold and hot wallets, how they can confiscate the bitcoin funds? Impossible, if that will be real, PBOC is criming, government should fire the head of PBOC.
PBOC is the government (or more precisely both are just subsidiary of the party). But yeah - they will not confiscate - they'll just allow moving the funds only between government approved wallets, this is the only way to stop BTC leaving the country and this is their goal announced already a few months ago. Next step will be controlling the Chinese miners.
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I would have thought that the people using bitcoin to evade Chinese capital controls were small fry. Most of the serious money uses property purchases abroad (they buy using a mortgage, and then take money slowly out of China to pay the mortgage, year on year).
Unless of course it is the miners who are getting their coins out of the country. They DO have a lot of money to take out that way. If they are shut down for capital flight, we have got trouble.
Chinese citizens can only move $50K yearly abroad - I don't think that there is an exception to paying mortgages - it would take 10 years to move half a million.
I guess some would move it slowly - but for most it would be more urgent now.