BTCC (formerly BTCChina) has joined OKCoin and Huobi in holding users bitcoin and litecoin hostage for self-survival. The industry reacted with the market equivalent of "Who Cares?"
Last week saw bitcoin plummet from highs nearly reaching 1080 to around $950 in a single 12 hour market session due to the rapidly spreading word of OKCoin and Huobi restricting all user withdraws of virtual currency.
However, once the dust settled, the apparent reason for the sudden limitation had nothing to do with an exit scam, platform hack, failing exchange, industry blow, or criminal activity. It had to do with self-preservation and not getting fined by the Chinese government for not following the rules they had all been potentially breaking all this time while grabbing as much profit for themselves as possible.
The BTCC Blow
BTCC joins OKCoin and Huobi as the third Chinese platform to restrict users access to their own property and have shut the outbound door on all withdraws of virtual currency.
Like the aforementioned two fine-dodgers, BTCC plan this outage for a period of one month. Let hope BTCC user don't have any bills to pay.
During the outage BTCC, like the others, will be implementing AML (anti-money laundering) software to help restrict activity involved with laundering money and like the other two we can only assume BTCC just crawled out from under a rock and just now realized that money laundering exists in the world or they've known about it like everybody else and just decided to grab as much cash as they could until they were all but forced to play by the rules.
BTCC CEO and cofounder Bobby Lee recently said "I think it’s a matter of time, not a matter of if. The question is when.", in regards to Chinese bitcoin regulation, "The answer is, I don’t know when it will happen but I know it will happen. I have confidence of that because fundamentally I think bitcoin exchanges need to be regulated." ¹
See the problem with this thinking? The know it's coming. They know money laundering exists. The know bitcoin, like all forms of value and money, has it's share of criminal activity. Yet, they do nothing for as long as they can until the Bank of China issues a warning then they quickly make their users suffer while they string something together to avoid disciplinary action.
If they knew all of this was coming, action should have been taken long before now. This is exactly why governments feel they have to enforce regulatory requirements on organizations. The companies won't do anything themselves and by their own actions, they show that they do absolutely nothing.
Market Reaction
Fortunately this time around, investors, traders, and those in the industry realized this is all it was about and bitcoin's market price was not affected at all. In fact, it's close to a full recovery having already peaked above $1000 since the incident.
If you missed the lower rates in the $900's it's still not too late to take advantage of the great rates, it's teetering just above and below $1000 currently.
Get on it!
Article by dinbits
Image Credits:
Banner Image by dinbits.com staff
Bobby Less Image by Matteo Giachetti Photography/Blockchain Week London/Business Insider
Article References:
¹ Bobby Lee quote referenced from Business Insider, Jan 24th, 2017.
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