How Chinese Bitcoin Buyers Are Getting Around Government Ban

How Chinese Bitcoin Buyers Are Getting Around Government Ban

How Chinese Bitcoin Buyers Are Getting Around Government Ban

Chinese citizens are still investing in Bitcoin and the cryptocurrency market despite the government’s heavy crackdown.

In September 2017, Chinese cryptocurrency exchanges BTCC China, Huobi and OKCoin were ordered by the government to shut down their businesses. At one point, executives of the three cryptocurrency exchanges were prevented from leaving the country, due to a government investigation into local cryptocurrency exchanges.

Three months later, in December of 2017, China’s three largest cryptocurrency exchanges relocated their businesses to Hong Kong. BTCC China, Huobi and OKCoin rebranded to BTCC, Huobi Pro and OKEx, respectively. They intended to address the rapidly growing demand from Hong Kong-based investors.

Shortly after their move, the three trading platforms started to see daily volumes from Chinese investors grow exponentially. Somehow, Chinese investors were managing to circumvent Chinese trading restrictions by using Hong Kong-based exchanges. How is this possible?

In Hong Kong, it is relatively easy for investors to set up businesses. With less than $1,000, businesses can be legally created, which allows the opening of business bank accounts at Hong Kong-based financial institutions. Beginning in December 2017, many Chinese investors moved their funds from their Chinese bank accounts to Hong Kong bank accounts and started to trade cryptocurrencies more actively, effectively bypassing China’s restrictions.

But, unlike China, Hong Kong has a substantially lower supply to meet the growing demand. While China is home to major miners like Bitmain, Hong Kong does not produce much Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. As such, premiums in the Hong Kong cryptocurrency market increased, surpassing even that of the South Korean market. On January 18, when the global average price of Bitcoin was around $11,500, Bitcoin was being traded at above $13,000 on Huobi Pro.

Krystal Hu, a Hong Kong-based finance journalist, noted that traders outside of China have also started to take advantage of the arbitrage opportunity presented by the Hong Kong market. For instance, on January 18, the price of Bitcoin on Coinbase was $11,800. Purchasing Bitcoin from Coinbase and selling it on any Hong Kong-based market would have generated $1,200 in profit.
 

Chinese Government Concerned

Hong Kong’s exchanges have also integrated widely-used fintech applications in China such as Alipay and Tencent’s WeChat Pay. Alipay is a $60 billion fintech app that is used by more than 50 percent of mobile users. WeChat Pay, which was only used by seven percent of mobile users in 2014, is now being used by more than 40 percent of mobile users in China.

The integration of the two fintech payment networks has increased the accessibility of Hong Kong-based cryptocurrency OTC exchanges for Chinese investors, easing the process of investing in the cryptocurrency market.

To prevent Chinese investors from buying digital currencies, the Chinese government and the People’s Bank of China (PBoC), have asked local banks to disclose any suspicious transactions linked to Hong Kong-based markets. However, even this action will not be able to prevent Chinese investors from accessing Hong Kong-based markets, due to apps such as Alipay and WeChat Pay.

 

Author Joseph Young

 

Posted by David Ogden Entrepreneur
David Ogden Cryptocurrency Entrepreneur

David

Vietnam Becomes the Latest to Ban Bitcoin, but in China, the Rules May Be Changing

Vietnam Becomes the Latest to Ban Bitcoin, but in China, the Rules May Be Changing

Vietnam Becomes the Latest to Ban Bitcoin, but in China, the Rules May Be Changing

Vietnam became the latest nation state to launch an attack on cryptocurrency, as regulators sided with the alarmists without providing much of a rationale.

Vietnam Issues Ban

The ban, which applies to all cryptocurrencies not deemed legal tender, was issued via formal statement by the State Bank of Vietnam. The punishment for accepting or offering payments in bitcoin can run more than $8,000 USD.

Vietnam’s central bank says only traditional forms of payment are accepted within its borders. This includes cash, checks, credit cards and other electronic payments.

The state-run bank has issued the following statement, according to Mirror:

“Bitcoin virtual currency and other similar is not lawful means of payment in Vietnam; The issuance, supply, use of bitcoin and other similar virtual currency as a means of payment is prohibited in Vietnam.”

The announcement, whenever it was made, had very little impact on cryptocurrency trading. At press time, bitcoin (BTC/USD) was trading at $6,162 for a gain of $57.

The bulls blew the door wide open this weekend, sending bitcoin north of $6,300 for the first time ever.
 

Chinese Ban? Let’s Move to Hong Kong

Now that China’s Communist Party gathering has come and gone, sanity appears to be returning to public discourse. That is, according to a recent report from CNLedger, which our pals at CCN.com recently covered. The trusted news sources have revealed that OKEX is expected to launch its peer-to-peer OTC bitcoin trading platform shortly.

As it turns out, OKEX and several other leading blockchain companies like BTCC and Huobi-Pro are located in Hong Kong. Theoretically, their presence in the Special Administrative Region allows them to circumnavigate the mainland’s recent ban on everything crypto-related.

It should be noted that OKEX is offering a bitcoin-to-crypto trading platform. Regardless of what Beijing thinks, it might not be a good idea to launch this platform on the mainland. That’s because the Chinese government recently blocked a major port for MetaTrader4, which is the engine of the online forex community.

Regulators have apparently shut down port ‘443’, which is used for secure web browser communications. The port also happens to be the one MT4 brokers use to connect to their trading server.

The port probably inhibits the government’s ability to spy on traders, or at least monitor their data flows (like that’s different?). There’s reason to believe this ban could extend to other trading platforms that utilize a similar standard.

Last month, China broadened its online censorship by blocking WhatsApp, the popular messaging platform acquired by Facebook for way too much. The ban was another blow to the social networking giant, as it too is banned on the mainland.

 

Author: Sam Bourgi

 

Posted by David Ogden Entrepreneur
David Ogden Cryptocurrency Entrepreneur

David

Global Regulators Play Bitcoin Whack-a-Mole as Demand Explodes

Banks Respond to Growing Interest in Cryptocurrencies

Global Regulators Play Bitcoin Whack-a-Mole as Demand Explodes

  • Evading government control a central feature of bitcoin
  • Efforts to regulate digital currencies stymie authorities


Banks Respond to Growing Interest in Cryptocurrencies

Regulators worldwide are finding that it’s incredibly hard to control the explosive growth of money tied to no nation.

Russian President Vladimir Putin is the latest to call for regulation of cryptocurrencies, saying there are “serious risks” they can be used for money laundering or tax evasion. Finance Minister Anton Siluanov has called for regulating digital money as securities, while central bank officials vowed to work with prosecutors to block websites that allow retail investors access to bitcoin exchanges. “We think this is a pyramid scheme,” said Sergey Shvetsov, first deputy governor of the central bank.

Global efforts to regulate digital money have accelerated in the past month since China banned initial coin offerings and ordered all cryptocurrency exchanges to close, following inspections of more than 1,000 trading venues over a six-month period. At least 13 other countries have imposed new rules or announced plans to tighten regulations, including South Korea, which also banned ICOs. Last week, European Central Bank Governing Council member Ewald Nowotny said the bank is discussing "concrete legal restrictions" on digital coin sales.

It’s a development that creators of bitcoin, the best-known digital currency, saw coming, and prepared for. Since it works on a peer-to-peer network, users can buy and sell coins and secure and perpetuate the system without any government or central bank involvement. Trying to control it is “like trying to catch water,” said Alex Tapscott, chief executive of NextBlock Global Ltd., a venture-capital firm that invests in blockchain startups.

Global Regulators Play Bitcoin Whack-a-Mole as Demand Explodes

Nine years after a mysterious coder that goes by the name Satoshi Nakamoto unleashed bitcoin on the world, some see it as a revolutionary use of technology that takes power away from governments and gives it to individuals, like handheld video cameras in the hands of civil rights activists, or social media during the Arab Spring uprisings.

"As cryptocurrencies gain wider acceptance, their ability to undermine politicians increases,” said Roger Ver, an early investor in bitcoin who is known as Bitcoin Jesus, for proselytizing about the digital currency in its early days. "The invention of bitcoin is one of the most liberating technologies in all of human history. It is on par with the importance of the invention of the printing press, or the internet itself."

Digital currencies live on computers and can be held by millions worldwide, bought and sold on websites, at MeetUps, or in person-to-person meetings. Even if there’s no ATM or exchange nearby, anyone with access to the Internet can buy them. And they can be used to purchase everything from a sandwich to a carpet to a house, or they can be held as an investment.

An investment of $1,000 in bitcoin in 2012 would now be worth about $4.9 million, while the number of transactions continues to increase. In the second quarter, they reached an average of about 291,000 per day for bitcoin and nearly double that when other major cryptocurrencies are included, from about 60,000 per day in 2013, according to researcher CoinDesk.
 

Dark Side

Yet there is an undeniable dark side. Bitcoin rose to prominence with Silk Road, a marketplace for weapons, drugs and other illicit goods, and it’s still used for such sales on the so-called Dark Web even after Silk Road was shut down. It’s also the currency of choice for hackers who have invaded the computers of everyone from hospitals to police departments. Even the North Korean government is accumulating bitcoin as a means to dodge international sanctions.

That’s why Jamie Dimon, the chief executive officer of JPMorgan Chase & Co., sees bitcoin as a “fraud” that’s destined to come crashing down, as its use in ransomware schemes, drug and arms trafficking ultimately persuades authorities to find a way to put a stop to it. “Someone’s going to get killed and then the government’s going to come down,” Dimon said. “You just saw in China, governments like to control their money supply.”

While any central banker might be troubled by a stateless currency competing with the coin of the realm, China’s efforts to crack down suggest it may be harder than it appears. While the government crackdown sent bitcoin prices plunging as much as 30 percent, it has now recovered those losses, even as a growing number of governments take action.

Once the largest global market for trading, China now accounts for 1.5 percent of bitcoin transactions, while Japan — where regulators have been more open to digital currencies — accounts for more than 60 percent, according to CryptoCompare.com.
 

Bitcoin Mining

China is the leader in bitcoin mining capacity — computers that are used to support bitcoin transactions and then get paid for the service with newly minted coins. Regulators have so far refrained from any action in that area. Wu Jihan, CEO of Bitmain Technologies Ltd., the world’s biggest mining operation, said in an interview that regional governments are welcome to legally set up bitcoin mining farms which are clean and considered part of the high-tech industry.

Cryptocurrencies are attractive where there are restrictions on taking cash abroad or where the local currency is weakening because of inflation. In Venezuela, a place with both problems, bitcoin’s weekly trading volume spiked to an all-time high in early April, when violent clashes between protesters and police started. The government has conducted raids on bitcoin miners, accusing them of “internet fraud and electricity theft.”

The same combination of capital controls, high inflation and a weakening currency have driven demand for cryptocurrencies across Latin America. Bitcoin demand spiked in Argentina in 2013 after former President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner banned dollar purchases, while Ecuador and Bolivia are among the few countries that have outright bans on the currency.

By contrast, the U.K. has exempted bitcoin from value-added taxes, and says it should be considered a foreign currency for corporate tax purposes. The U.K. was early in publishing clear directives, ruling in 2014 that "bitcoin may be held as an investment or used to pay for goods or services at merchants where it is accepted.”
 

Crypto-Friendly Japan

Japan this year began enforcing a law that recognizes bitcoin as a legal method of payment, and overseeing cryptocurrency exchanges — effectively providing clarity and support to local entrepreneurs. That’s something Vietnam may do as well.

The U.S. Commodities Futures Trading Commission classified bitcoin as a commodity in September 2015 and this year approved the first cryptocurrency options trading, clearing and settlement firm. The Securities and Exchange Commission in July said some coins issued in ICOs would be considered securities and regulated as such unless “a valid exemption applies.”

While government efforts to come to grips with digital money have been fraught, the more important trend may be the growing number of money managers who are looking at cryptocurrencies as an asset class for investment.

"What’s more interesting is the increased sophistication of the institutional buy side for cryptocurrencies," said Nolan Bauerle, director of research at CoinDesk. "This new type of buyer means this is only a hiccup. There are important sums of fiat ready to cross into crypto in the short term." There are more than 68 hedge funds focused on cryptocurrencies today, many of them run by people from Wall Street.

 

Author: L Olga Kharif and Camila Russo
11 October 2017, 10:00 BST

 

Posted by David Ogden Entrepreneur
David Ogden Cryptocurrency Entrepreneur

 

David

Chinese money dominates bitcoin, now its companies are gunning for blockchain tech

Chinese money dominates bitcoin, now its companies are gunning for blockchain tech

Chinese money dominates bitcoin, now its companies are gunning for blockchain tech

Beijing, China

It’s a sweltering summer night when I’m invited to join a bitcoin miner from Shenzhen at a “bitcoin club” somewhere in downtown Beijing. I’ve just returned from visiting one of the world’s largest bitcoin mines and find myself at a gathering of cryptocurrency enthusiasts at a craft beer brewery in the Sanlitun nightlife district.

I excuse myself from the bitcoin meetup and resort to jumping in a pirate taxi because I don’t have a mobile wallet from Alibaba or Tencent—the primary way to hail and pay for taxis in the city. After paying in cash—now a rarity in China’s mobile payment saturated cities—I disembark, then get lost amid Beijing’s ancient hutongs, the narrow alleyways that link China’s traditional courtyard residences.

My host puts me out of my misery by sharing his location on a real-time map over our WeChat direct messages. Now drenched in sweat, I meet Jack Liao, who runs a bitcoin mining firm called Lightning Asic. He leads me through a dark hutong, coming to a set of carved wooden double-doors. Pushing them open, we enter into the courtyard of a palatially renovated villa. This is my first look at the elusive “bitcoin club.”

The club is located in a 2,000-square-foot villa with a staff of 15, including cooks, cleaners, and wait people. It has two guest rooms, a dining room that hosts two dozen people, a professional Texas Hold ‘Em table emblazoned with the legend, “Faith in Bitcoin,” an automated mahjong table; shelves stacked with fine wine and liquor, a room for practicing Chinese caligraphy, and so on. The table stakes are bitcoin, AliPay credits, and sometimes even yuan, the only non-virtual currency accepted. Guests can sleep, eat, drink, and gamble for free if they’re acquainted with the miners who run the place. “People come here just to chat about projects,” Liao says.

The eye-popping villa bankrolled by bitcoin mining is a symbol of just how lucrative the cryptocurrency industry has been for some on the Chinese mainland. China is home to the world’s largest bitcoin mines, thanks to abundant and cheap electricity, and at one time the country accounted for 95% of the volume traded in global markets. Its central bank is experimenting with a blockchain-backed digital currency, and its biggest companies, from tech giants to industrial conglomerates, are racing to bake blockchain tech into major new projects.

All this points to a central question: How did stateless cryptocurrencies get so big in China, a country where the national currency—along with so much else—remains tightly controlled by the government? Why has bitcoin, along with other cryptocurrencies, flourished with so much vigor here in China? A two-week journey through bitcoin trading operations in Shanghai, mining operations in Inner Mongolia, and the club in Beijing hasn’t answered the question definitely—but it’s gotten me much closer.

Bitcoin is a political statement

Bitcoin began as an experiment in economics and politics, as a project to create electronic money that anyone could use but no one controlled, especially a sovereign authority. The code behind the new currency gave life to libertarian ideals like: money free from government controls on spending and taxation; transactions that could ignore a global, sometimes corrupt banking system; and freedom from central bank targeting of interest rates and inflation. It was also rebuke to the very notion of conventional money.

Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, encoded a headline from the Times of London in the first block of transactions ever created on the bitcoin blockchain. It read: “The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.”

Given bitcoin’s political bona fides, it’s a great irony that Chinese companies and individual users are so dominant in its daily activities. The world’s biggest bitcoin miner is a Beijing-based company called Bitmain, which operates two mining pools that control nearly 30% of all the processing power devoted to bitcoin mining. It might seem that Chinese bitcoiners are carrying out some kind of libertarian protest against China’s ruling communist party, subverting the status quo by processing cryptocurrency transactions towards a yet-to-be-revealed political end.

They aren’t.

“In China, bitcoin is one thing and in America and Europe it is another thing,” Liao said as we sipped tea from porcelain cups on the villa’s top floor. Our host, Wu Bi, explains there is no competition between cryptocurrencies and the government-controlled renminbi, at least as the government sees it. “In China our government says bitcoin is not a currency, it is a commodity, so there is no chance it will compete with the renminbi,” Wu told me in Chinese, with Liao translating. “Bitcoin is a great idea, but in China we care more about blockchain.”

Wu and his Chinese compatriots are focused not on the currency, but on the technology behind it. Blockchain is simply a technical way to record encrypted transactions that are distributed across a computer network; once entered they cannot be altered. Instead of using blockchain, or bitcoin, as a permissionless cryptocurrency, banks want to shoe-horn some of bitcoin’s features into current transaction systems to create a low-cost network that, crucially, would require administrators to grant users access. Those administrators, of course, would be banks, or central banks. “Different countries may have different ideas about what is government, and what is the liberty of individuals,” Wu says.

Bitcoin users I met in Beijing were similarly dismissive of bitcoin’s libertarian politics. They did not want to be named or quoted directly, but their argument was essentially this: People in China simply aren’t interested in bitcoin’s potential for political change. And besides, China’s closely controlled economy has delivered prosperity for now—what benefits does bitcoin bring besides as an investment that might appreciate?

Object of speculation

Ordinary Chinese bitcoin users I spoke to, and those who are served by the exchanges and wallet providers, are far more interested in the ability to speculate on bitcoin’s wild price swings—it’s just another way to make money as China continues to adopt characteristics of a market economy.

As it happens, bitcoin arrived just as a class of retail investors in China is growing in size, and seeking better returns than those offered by a restricted financial products market. Even the market for property in China’s top-tier coastal cities, usually reliable for spectacular returns, has been subjected to ever tightening lending restrictions by a government eager to curb speculation. “[Chinese consumers] have had such limited channels for so long, and [bitcoin] was finally one that was not tightly controlled by the government,” says Martin Chorzempa, a research fellow specializing in Chinese internet finance at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington DC.

One seasoned observer of the Chinese bitcoin scene concurs. Eric Zhao is n engineer at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Shanghai and runs the widely followed Twitter account CN Ledger. Bitcoin became popular almost by default, because of the paucity of products for the Chinese retail investor, he says. “There are not many good investment choices for common people in China. Many people worry about inflation and lots of people feel insecure about their financial status,” he says. “They buy it simply because they believe it will appreciate in value.”

Uncorrelated to major asset classes and generally disconnected from the Chinese economy, bitcoin has been hugely attractive to Chinese investors already overweight domestic stocks and property. Indeed, research from Pantera Capital, a venture fund for blockchain companies, shows that bitcoin is almost completely uncorrelated to major equity, debt, and commodity asset classes. “Because [bitcoin] is globally connected, it’s not easily affected by the Chinese economy,” says Isaac Mao, a longtime entrepreneur and investor in China’s technology scene. “It may be the only economic activity fully connected to the global economy.”

Crackdown

The wild ride on bitcoin in China, however, braked to a stop Sept. 4, when China’s central bank began to take steps to halt domestic bitcoin trading. It started with a ban on “initial coin offerings,” followed by a shutdown of local bitcoin exchanges. China’s authorities have clamped down on bitcoin trading before, most notably in 2014, when the cryptocurrency was on a historic rally driven, in part, by Chinese money.

Now rumors are swirling that a ban on bitcoin mining may be enacted. But if the government has found bitcoin to be a potentially dangerous element in the country’s socio-political mix, why didn’t it crack down before? Instead, it has been relatively tolerant of a technology that was designed to weaken the state’s grip on money.

The rare true believer in bitcoin’s libertarian properties is Bobby Lee, an American who runs the world’s oldest bitcoin exchange, BTCC, in Shanghai. His firm was forced to shut down domestic trading through its BTCChina arm, although it still runs an exchange for non-Chinese traders. When we spoke before the crackdown in August, Lee was enthusiastic about government regulation, saying it would help the market mature. But he also struck a defiant note, saying that bitcoin’s design made it impossible for China’s regulators to shut down. “There is nothing [the Chinese government] can do. That is the beauty of [bitcoin],” he said.

I pointed out that the government could seize exchanges, and even bitcoin mining facilities, and compel their owners to run certain types of code or mess with transactions, thus damaging the cryptocurrency. Lee was sanguine. “They’ll want to control it, but bitcoin was not meant to be controlled,” he said. “You can make all the rules you want, and the question is, can they be enforced? With guns you can say, let’s make guns illegal. But with bitcoin, there’s nothing physical. It’s information, and there’s plausible deniability.”

The reality may be more prosaic. Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies are simply too small to bother the Chinese government much, says Isaac Mao, the investor and entrepreneur and one of China’s earliest bloggers. “The [Chinese Communist Party] doesn’t recognize it as a threat, so bitcoin actually grows very quickly in China,” he told me at a cafe in Hong Kong, where he is now based. “But it’s too small. There is no scale. The market capitalization of bitcoin is about the same as PayPal,” or about $70 billion.

I spoke to Mao in August, but the crackdown doesn’t signal any political threat, writes Chorzempa of the Peterson Institute. It’s more likely that bitcoin trading is just collateral damage from a wider set of restrictions on alternative financial products that have caused billions in consumer losses. Regulators have reigned in not just crypto trading but peer-to-peer loans, trusts, and lending to non-bank institutions this year, Chorzempa writes: “The clampdown thus fits into a broader set of efforts to lessen financial market risks perceived by Chinese policymakers.”

Everyone hates inflation

To the extent that bitcoin trading and mining is a political statement, it’s a demonstration against inflation. Prices in China grew rapidly in the aftermath of the financial crisis in 2008, hitting their highest level in decades in 2007. Inflation has moderated since then, but ordinary Chinese say they still feel the pinch.

Bitmain’s Micree Zhang, who developed its proprietary mining chips, says worry about inflation chewing up his earnings was one reason why he first became interested in bitcoin. “Before I knew about bitcoin I disliked, and was very worried about, inflation. Especially in China in the last 10 years,” he said when I visited with him at Bitmain’s main facility in Inner Mongolia. “When I discovered bitcoin, I knew it was a good idea, very quickly.”

One bitcoin user I met in Beijing told me he was attracted to the cryptocurrency because the government couldn’t devalue it by printing more money, unlike the yuan. The Chinese government controls its currency far more tightly than other major economies.

This level of control can lead to panics. In 2015, the Chinese government devalued the yuan in an attempt to boost economic growth, sending shockwaves through global markets. While today the central bank’s move is seen as astute, at the time Chinese consumers were hit hard, worrying about paying more for everything from Australian beef to New Zealand milk.

Digging for digital gold

China has been the world’s largest electricity producer since it surpassed the United States in 2011. Cheap electricity is the crucial ingredient for a profitable bitcoin mining operation—and China has it in spades. So it’s no surprise that China has become a world center for the activity.

Take Beijing-based Bitmain, for instance. It’s the world’s biggest bitcoin miner, but the company doesn’t divulge its financial data, and there’s no easy way to find out because its beneficial owner is a trust in the Cayman Islands. But one longtime commentator in the bitcoin space, Jimmy Song, has performed an analysis of the firm’s likely profitability. His estimate: $77 million in mining profits for the firm this year, of which electricity and other operational costs come up to about $23 million.

It’s estimated that two-thirds of the world’s processing power devoted to mining bitcoin resides in China. These bitcoin mines take the form of giant warehouses filled with thousands of custom-designed machines and chips, all whirring away to check bitcoin transactions and compete for a slice of the 12.5 bitcoins awarded to a miner every 10 minutes. Collectively, bitcoin miners have collected more than $2 billion in revenue over the cryptocurrency’s nine-year lifespan.

Bitmain leads the pack as both a creator of bitcoin mining rigs and chips, and an operator of vast server farms. It’s now raised $50 million from marquee Silicon Valley investors including Sequoia Capital to expand to the US—perhaps reducing its exposure to Chinese regulations—and to develop a new set of chips for artificial intelligence.
 

Sheer scale

Bitmain’s position as the world’s largest miner is only the tip of Chinese industrial interest on blockchain technology. Last May, a Chinese company called Wanxiang Group, one of the world largest automotive parts makers, sponsored a blockchain hackathon at the Deloitte offices in Rockefeller Center in New York. Wanxiang plans to embed blockchain technology into a new “smart city“—a nine square kilometer plot of land with a planned population of 90,000 people and $30 billion in investment—that it is building from scratch near Hangzhou in eastern China. It was looking for the world’s brightest blockchain developers.

Wanxiang was offering $15,000 to teams who came up with an enticing blockchain project for the smart city, with an additional $1 million in funding. As Wanxiang executive Peter Liang clicked through his slides detailing how blockchains would power everything from the city’s electricity grid to its traffic control system and be embedded in Wanxiang’s factories, the handful of programmers in the room grew both skeptical and awed. “It’s so huge, it’s hard to even believe,” one developer told him.

Wanxiang isn’t the only Chinese conglomerate with blockchain dreams. Beyond cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, some of China’s biggest firms are betting on the technical ideas behind it to revolutionize their businesses. They’re placing much bigger bets than their counterparts elsewhere in the world, who are mired in small-scale trials, proofs of concepts, or slow moving consortia. Chinese companies “are not only moving faster, but the scale of their blockchain ambitions dwarf what we’re seeing elsewhere,” says Garrick Hileman, of the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance.

The Chinese e-commerce giant JD has already launched a food supply tracking system using a blockchain in Beijing supermarkets and online stores. The tech giant Tencent has partnered with Intel to develop a blockchain architecture. And the People’s Bank of China, the country’s central bank, has said it’s researching blockchain technology as a way to potentially digitize the yuan.

Blockchains for industry

Unlike firms elsewhere in the world, Chinese companies sense an opportunity to unify the fragmented data flows flowing through their stupendously large and complicated factory floors and supply chains by marrying a blockchain data layer with Internet of Things devices. Conveniently, these applications are also free of the regulation and scrutiny that can slow down financial applications. “I personally believe that non-financial [applications] will go commercial sooner,” says Vincent Wang, Wanxiang’s chief innovation officer.

Foxconn, one of the world’s largest contract manufacturers of electronics and best known for manufacturing Apple’s iPhone, sees blockchain as way for its suppliers to get easy financing. “In China, 85% of SMEs can’t get financing,” Foxconn executive Jack Lee told a conference in New York in May. “They have to go to shadow banking … so it’s very inefficient and costly.” If Foxconn can leverage its current data on small businesses through blockchain, it could create a highly efficient supply chain that could also track delivered goods.

Just as mobile phones allowed China and emerging economies to leapfrog the rich world’s telephone landlines, blockchain technologies could help its industries skip the development of antiquated financial services models. After all, Chinese tech firms Alibaba and Tencent are already processing trillions of dollars through their mobile payments businesses. “We are more interested in getting to a next-generation financial services business,” Foxconn’s Lee says. “That’s the key. As a side benefit for Foxconn, it will streamline the supply chain.”

Those kinds of observations make less worrisome the recent drop in China’s share of bitcoin trading volume as well as rumors on Telegram chat groups about an imminent crackdown on even China’s powerful bitcoin miners. Because Chinese money’s waning influence over the bitcoin markets may be replaced by control over an even greater prize.

As it continues to move from a rural to an industrial economy, China needs to leapfrog the incumbents and assert itself as a technology leader. Bitcoin and the ideas behind its blockchain may be one way to do that—and it may be why China has been a leader of a stateless cryptocurrency for so long.

 

Author: Joon Ian Wong

 

Posted by David Ogden Entrepreneur
david ogden cryptocurrency entrepreneur

David

The Dollar’s Slow Demise Continues in Plain Sight

The Dollar's Slow Demise Continues in Plain Sight

Byron King

BY 
POSTED 
JULY 26, 2017

The Dollar’s Slow Demise Continues in Plain Sight

“The end of the world’s present monetary system is already taking place,” says one of Mexico’s leading, hard-money economists, Hugo Salinas Price. “The U.S. is losing influence in the world… The end of the dollar as the basis of the international monetary system means the end of the U.S. as we have known it.”

You may or may not know of Salinas Price, but he’s a serious player at high monetary levels.

He’s not nearly as famous as most television talking-heads on mainstream U.S. media. However, he’s been following monetary issues for many decades. He’s a Mexican business magnate and founder of the Mexican retail chain, Elektra. He also happens to be a historian of money.

According to Salinas Price, “The present monetary system of the world, based on the dollar, is on its death-bed. A fiat currency — such as the dollar — cannot be replaced by another fiat currency,” he explains. “Therefore, the world will necessarily have to take up (precious metals) as the world’s money.”

Salinas Price does not foresee the U.S., or other leading Western nations, taking the lead in resolving their own currency issues. Instead, he thinks, “it is likely that the Eurasian Bloc will initiate the monetary transformation of the world, in due course.”

Specifically, he foresees China and Russia creating a gold- and/or silver-backed currency to conduct trade. Salinas Price himself has long urged Mexico to adopt a silver-based currency, to retain value inside that nation’s economy, using the peso.

Globally, there’s an obvious flight to hard currency. Whatever may happen with the day-to-day price of “paper gold,” all of the physical metal, from every mine, mill and refinery in the world, has a buyer for every ounce.

A Different Kind of Russian Collusion

Just follow the data for proof…

China, Russia and India are all accumulating massive amounts of gold. Other large amounts of gold are moving into the Middle East, and other Asian nations. For example, below is a recent graph, showing Russia’s steady accumulation of gold over the past decade.

Russian Central Bank Gold Reserves

This kind of gold buildup in Russia is no accident. Russia has a clear, national policy to accumulate gold within its state treasury. That’s because Russian policy makers are concerned about U.S./Western actions, including economic sanctions, NATO expansion, near-constant and long-term bellicose rhetoric and more.

Russian policymakers are pushing back, as you likely know from following the news. Russia is confronting the U.S./West not just directly — by building submarines and missiles, and deploying troops into Syria, for example — but also via asymmetric means.

One U.S./Western weakness, in the eyes of Russian policymakers, is the dollar — the currency used for international trade. Russian strategists detect a long-term decline of value and global significance for the U.S. buck. It’s a wide-open target for asymmetric push-back.

According to a recent report in Russia’s Sputnik News, “In the years to come, global financial markets will see a significant devaluation of the American currency… Russia and China continue to stockpile gold in a bid to cut their economies’ dependency on the U.S. dollar in the future.”

Radical Political and Economic Transformations Will Increase as the Dollar’s Global Role Decreases

In summary, Sputnik states that, “if the dollar’s role as a global reserve currency is decreased, the world will see radical political and economic transformation.”

Right now, nearly 60% of global trade is denominated in dollars. By stockpiling gold, Russia and China want to gain monetary independence, while reducing their respective reliance on the dollar.

That approach, outlined in Sputnik, parallels what other high-level Russians have stated about their national monetary strategy.

Sergey Glazyev, a well-placed Russian politician and key Kremlin player, recently declared: “As soon as we (Russia) and China dump the dollar, it will be the end of the U.S. military might.”

In an interview with Russian News Agency TASS (successor to the old, Soviet-era TASS news service), Glazyev explained, “The United States has no tools to make all others use the dollar other than a truncheon. That is why they are indulging in a hybrid war with the entire world to shift their debt burden on to other countries, to confine everyone to the dollar and weaken territories they cannot control.”

Per Glazyev, the “only way to stop U.S. aggression is to get rid of dollar addiction.”

The Final Flailing of a Failing Empire

In the West — and certainly in the U.S. — there’s a tendency to dismiss this kind of pro-gold/anti-dollar thinking and commentary by Russians. In fact, it’s a stretch for most people to imagine any world in which the dollar is not king.

Yet, more and more global trade is moving away from dollar denominations. Russia conducts much of its trade with China in rubles-yuan, with a gold exchange in Shanghai to ensure proper valuation. Plus, you’ve likely heard of China’s efforts to conduct more and more trade across the world in yuan, all backed by the Shanghai Gold Exchange.

Indeed, Beijing is even working with Saudi Arabia to displace the petrodollar as the basis for pricing oil exports to China. China already imports oil from Russia, Iran and Angola, priced in yuan and those yuan are tradable for gold. Looking ahead, if China breaks the Saudi link to the petrodollar, there’s no telling what the repercussions could be in other sectors of international trade.

Gold and silver are making a monetary comeback.

We’re fast approaching a new monetary tipping point. The next global trading system is already setting up, in plain sight, as long as you follow the facts and note who is buying gold bars, and where that metal is heading.

What can the individual investor do?

Well, if you don’t hold physical precious metal, get some. And if you are not well-invested in precious metal mining shares, you need to get there.

Echoing Jim Rickards, I believe that you should have at least 10% of your portfolio devoted to precious metals and mining shares; more, if it helps you sleep better at night.

Regards,
Byron King
for The Daily Reckoning

David

Is China Waking up to Ethereum

Is China Waking up to Ethereum

Is China Waking up to Ethereum

On May 27, Huobi, one of the three leading bitcoin exchanges in China alongside BTCC and OKCoin, officially integrated support for Ethereum trading. The Huobi development team announced that users will be able to trade Ethereum starting from May 31.

In its announcement, Huobi revealed that the company has come to a consensus to integrate support for Ethereum due to its exponential growth, high market liquidity, stability and increase in the demand toward Ethereum in both China and internationally.

Local sources including CNLedger reported that Huobi’s integration of Ethereum was an important milestone for the Chinese Ethereum community and market as the market liquidity for Ethereum within China was substantially low due to the lack of support from local exchanges.

Previously, exchanges including OKCoin did express their enthusiasm toward Ethereum and hinted at the possibility of integrating Ethereum support in the near future. In fact, OKCoin representatives told CNLedger that OKCoin has been planning to list Ethereum and that the company plans to integrate Ethereum at an appropriate time.

Thus, it is likely that other major bitcoin exchanges such as OKCoin will soon integrate Ethereum support following the footsteps of Huobi, which serves millions of users in China alone.

Although Ethereum has been enjoying an exponential growth in Asian markets including Japan and South korea, Ethereum is relatively unknown to the majority of Chinese cryptocurrency traders that have been investing in bitcoin and Litecoin. Cryptocurrency traders have only begun to take interest in Ethereum after the formation of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance and the Ethereum Foundation’s visit to the country.

Earlier in May, Consensus Systems (ConsenSys) head of global business development Andrew Keys attended the Global Blockchain Financial Summit with other members of the Ethereum Foundation including Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin. Prior to the Global Blockchain Financial Summit, Keys and the rest of the Ethereum Foundation visited Ethereum communities in Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing and Hangzhou.

Keys discovered that the Ethereum adoption throughout China has been increasing at a rapid rate. Large conglomerates have started to build applications on top of the Ethereum protocol and universities have been researching into Ethereum’s potential within the finance market.

Even government-owned companies including the Royal Chinese Mint, the subordinate unit of China Banknote Printing and Minting, have started to utilize Ethereum to digitize the RMB. Keys explained that the Royal Chinese Mint is currently utilizing the ERC 20 token standard and Ethereum smart contracts to digitize the RMB.

More to that, CryptoCoinsNews also reported that Ant Financial, the subsidiary company of e-commerce giant Alibaba, is also utilizing the Ethereum protocol to develop various applications and platforms. Ant Financial is the company behind the $60 billion financial network Alipay, which is used by 450 million users in China.

Keys noted:

“The services provided by Ant Financial and its affiliates cover payment, wealth management, credit reporting, private bank and cloud computing. Ant Financial is experimenting with Ethereum technology to improve their global payment platforms.”

The rapid rise in the demand toward Ethereum and the adoption of the Ethereum smart contract technology could allow China to become one of the larger Ethereum exchange markets in the world. At the moment, South Korea is the largest Ethereum exchange market with over 40 percent of the global market share. If China continues to sustain such growth rate, it will see its Ethereum market outpace other regions.

Ethereum Foundation members including Vitalik Buterin are actively encouraging companies and users in China to utilize the Ethereum protocol to build decentralized applications.

 

David Ogden
Entrepreneur

 

Author:Joseph Young

David

IMF quota reform approved by Congress in spending bill

China to get more power under reform deal

 

By

IanTalley

 

 

 Getty Images

 

Long-awaited IMF reform was approved in Congress.

WASHINGTON–U. S. lawmakers look set to ratify a five-year-old international deal to overhaul the governance of the International Monetary Fund that gives emerging markets such as China greater power at the emergency lender.

Lawmaker approval would resolve a long-running grievance by emerging powers that their voice and vote at the shareholder institution doesn’t represent their growing economic heft in the world.

Congressional leaders agreed early Wednesday morning to include the changes in a catch-all spending bill, which could become law in the coming days.

“We look forward to the outcome of the legislative process,” said IMF spokesman Gerry Rice.

U.S. lawmakers have stymied modernization of the fund’s shareholder governance for years, fomenting resentment among the IMF’s emerging-market membership.

An expanded version of this story is available at WSJ.com

David