The impact of the September 4 official Chinese ICO statement on bitcoin
On September 4, 2017 the People's Bank of China together with six other Chinese departments released a public statement on regulation policies for ICO projects. The initial conclusion was that China had banned Initial Coin Offerings (ICO's). That was not so strange because a lot of ICO's appeared to be scams.
On September 8 an official English translation of this statement was released.
The full official English translation of the announcement can be found here:
https://www.ethnews.com/peoples-bank-of-china-offers-translated-guidance-on-token-offerings
It was not before September 15 that the general public realised that one section in the announcement referred to crypto exchanges in general. The text of that section is:
"III. Management of Related Platforms Shall be Strengthened
From the date of release of this Notice, any so-called platform that provide trading and exchange services for coin offering shall not engage in exchange businesses between legal tender and token or “virtual currency”; or engage in proprietary trading activities or trading as an central counterparty of tokens or “virtual currencies”; or provide pricing services or act as information intermediary for tokens or “virtual currencies”.
As for the trading platforms with activities that have violated laws or regulations, the financial regulatory authorities will notify the administrative department in charge of telecommunications to adopt measures such as shutting down its website platform and mobile APP, notify the administrative departments in charge of cyberspace to remove its mobile APP from the APP store, and notify the business administration department to revoke its business license."
It was also on September 15 that most major Chinese exchanges announced that they would stop their services by the end of the month. On the sites of BTCC, Jubi, Yunbi, ViaBTC and Huobi similar messages appeared. I included the full text of the BTCC message in my previous post: https://steemit.com/bitcoin/@firemonkey/china-is-closing-down-all-cryptocurrency-exchanges
On the site of OKCoin however I cannot find any information yet.
At the moment it is clear that CNY to crypto and crypto to CNY exchanges will be banned. It is not clear if crypto to crypto exchanges will also be banned. It is also not clear what will happen to the huge Chinese mining industry. I think that the Chinese miners have no intention whatsoever to damage bitcoin. They believe in the concept of bitcoin and invested a lot of money in it. Chinese government however could easily force the miners to perform actions that will harm bitcoin. It is a great concern that the Chinese government will have control over almost 90% of the total hashing power.