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Comment by mrb | Hacker News Reader

Speculation: It seems China is doing this to replace them all with a single government-run Bitcoin exchange:

https://mobile.twitter.com/cnLedger/status/90709502238582374...

This would allow them to associate an identity behind most inbound and outbound Bitcoin transactions to/from the exchange...

"Perfect control, classic China" as a Twitter user said.

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reminds me of scene in Mr. Robot where E-Corp exec is proposing a deal to a govt official: "With eCoin we control the ledger… and the mining servers. We are the authority! I will make sure you have visibility into every single wallet that’s open, every loan, every transaction…"

a single entity controlling a cryptocurrency defeats the purpose of cryptocurrency. just issue something like amazon credit or whatever.

just one example of how weak the writing is on mr. robot. the basis of everything must be "Lol hackers bro amirite?"

Eh, there have been plenty of "blockchain, but controlled by one entity" projects proposed. The fact they make no sense and have negative benefits doesn't stop them from being deployed. Also see zCash's trusted setup which possibly allows them to mint unlimited money.

The Zcash trusted setup was decentralized: multiple persons/entities/third-parties participated, including Peter Todd who generated his part of the parameters while driving across Canada with a laptop that was destroyed after the process... http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/computing/networks/the-cr...

Sure that defeats satoshi's original intended purpose. But surely a nefarious govt and corp might be interested in colluding to pervert that original purpose.

I say the writing on Mr. Robot is quite good...in fact I would say it ranks as the top quality of hacker speak of all popular modern TV.

I don't see the mention of BTC anywhere in the app that is released or in the announcements from that twitter log. They talk about using "blockchain technology", which I assume means a new coin.

It's pretty trivial to convert from BTC to Monero and back. There are even services that will send a specific address BTC automatically if you send them Monero. So unless the exchange is going to ban mixed coins and Monero-based sources, that won't lead to Orwellian-style undodgeable monitoring of every transaction.

It's an option to do that, of course, but it would be precedent-setting. No one else bans BTC that came in via a Monero service.

Considering people in China are using Bitcoin to skirt Chinese capital controls, this would be the "right" move (in the mind of the government.) If China were to hamfistedly crack down on bitcoin and centralize exchanges under government control, bitcoin would collapse (imo.) I honestly think such measures are inevitable from Chinese officials. Though the problem I'm sure is that there are some officials or people tied to them that now holds coins, which gives them some conflict. Bitcoin as an industry is sort of baffling to me.

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