It's funny how the BTC China announcement was positively spun on r/BitcoinMarkets. Usually that sub is pretty diligent.
http://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinMarkets/comments/2267ri/btcchina_statement/They're acting as if the recent statement provides evidence that Bobby Lee spoke with regulators and they assured him his company's bank accounts would not be touched. Seems to be anything but the truth. If you look at the Coindesk article, it's actually a much different story:
http://www.coindesk.com/btc-china-dismisses-pboc-fears-open-letter/We can see here that Bobby Lee is in the same boat he's always in. He has no idea what's going on. Same as when Huobi starting accepting deposits again, and he was standing around with his dick in his hands. Bobby Lee is the guy with the least information, at all times.
He accepted a large investment into his exchange back in mid/late 2013. This Bitcoin exchange is his whole life, his legacy. Imagine his situation. He's trying to act cool in public, but deep down he's absolutely shitting himself. It's one thing to get cut off from third party processors, but cut off from the banks?? Deep down he knows that without being able to handle deposits, his exchange is useless.
Think about the amount of money that goes through these exchanges. We're talking millions of USD each day. How the hell can you be processing that much money without a bank account? The Chinese exchanges make VERY little profit per dollar that goes through their exchanges. The competition is so fierce that most exchanges have 0% trading fees, and only collect a fee of 1% during withdrawal.
If you look at the amount of money the average Chinese exchange makes per dollar that is deposited into the site, you really start to get the idea why these exchanges are doomed without banks. They'll look at creating some Voucher deposit method, but it just won't bring enough volume. They need to be processing millions a day just to break even.
It's over for Bobby Lee.
