if China decided to ban its citizens from holding bitcoin, the digital currency would collapse in price. China is currently the largest market for bitcoin transactions, with more than 90% of Bitcoin transactions occurring in China. Therefore, any adverse regulatory changes will have a direct impact on Bitcoin investment in the world.
Here are a few interesting news stories for you.
Today, China's exchanges report 98% of global volume, a figure that would suggest a huge dominance by its markets.
Unfortunately, we know that most of this volume is fake.
Unlike the rest of the world, China-based exchanges are unique in that they do not charge fees on bitcoin trades. Instead they make money via withdrawal charges out of the exchange. Further, these fees reduce as your trading volume increases, so this incentivizes traders to bolster this figure by buying and selling from themselves at zero cost.
https://www.coindesk.com/estimating-data-china-real-bitcoin-trading-volumes/....
China Is Said to Ban Bitcoin Exchanges While Allowing OTCSeptember 10, 2017China plans to ban trading of bitcoin and other virtual currencies on domestic exchanges, dealing another blow to the $150 billion cryptocurrency market after the country outlawed initial coin offerings last week.
The ban will only apply to trading of cryptocurrencies on exchanges, according to people familiar with the matter, who asked not to be named because the information is private. Authorities don’t have plans to stop over-the-counter transactions, the people said. China’s central bank said it couldn’t immediately comment.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-11/china-is-said-to-ban-bitcoin-exchanges-while-allowing-otc-trades-j7fofh20 ....
There's a question as to whether china banning citizens from holding bitcoin would have more of an effect than china attempting to ban exchanges. Also there's a question as to whether bitcoin has become decentralized enough for china not to factor heavily into bitcoin's price. After exchanges were banned earlier this year in china there wasn't much of a price shift.
Some polls claim 2% of americans have used crypto currencies which factors out to around 6+ million people.
Maybe in 2014 bitcoin would have been centralized heavily enough in china for exchange bans or outright bans to have a huge difference in price but since then it seems bitcoin has become decentralized and distributed throughout enough countries for it to not be as much of an issue.