So, recent news that China is either going to ban bitcoin exchanges, or they already have ... If that's the case, will that include miners? Or will mining become pointless if they can't exchange BTC to pay their expenses? I keep hearing that China has cheap energy, so I was wondering all along if China would discover these energy hogs and either tax them, or shut them down. What sort of effect would this have on Bitcoin mining if China gets shutdown? Catastrophic? Or the difficulty goes down and we get on fine without them?
There is nothing to be worrying here about. What i read is that if ever the China authorities would decide to finally stop all Bitcoin exchanges, they will still allow the peer-to-peer Bitcoin exchange and financial institutions can still be doing business selling Bitcoin (the buying part is what is vague).
In other words, the possibility is that this will not affect miners (and there are so many of them there!) and they can still continue on doing business. The next question would be on how these miners can be able to convert their Bitcoin to the local cash...maybe the government would also issue some rules on this.
The government am sure is quite aware that some of their citizens are involved in big Bitcoin mining and maybe they also do not want to kill this big industry right there and then. I still believe that China is just taking the time to sort things out so they can formulate a more comprehensive regulations covering cryptocurrency...otherwise they will be left by other countries like Japan and Russia (this country has the ambition of becoming a cryptocurrency hub).
