There's another way the wealthy in China can acquire bitcoins which will impact prices, they can mine the coins themselves. I can see the very wealthy setting up mining "factories" for the sole purpose of generating their own cache of coins. This would make difficulty skyrocket and squeeze the ROI of miners everywhere. Miners would hold out for higher prices which would put pricing pressure on bitcoins across all exchanges. China is fighting a losing battle, if people want something, they'll find a way to get it.
The AMD Radeon GPU are made in China. We are even now seeing really strong competition between gamers and miners here in the U.S., selling out stocks of high end AMD cards as soon as they hit the shelves, especially the coveted MSI and ASUS R9 series cards. We see wild prices when googling for shopping these cards. It is undeniable, China can barely keep up with U.S. demand.
And I agree 1,000%, those that like bitcoin, and especially Charles Lee's Litecoin, they are going to setup mining facilities, and they have a much more direct access to AMD GPU coming out of the Chinese factories in China. GPU retailers are going to service the markets with the least cost to sell into, and that is China. Why ship the cards to the U.S. and to Europe when there is an extremely large middle, upper middle and wealthy class growing in China, with an interest, (an interest spurned by their government), in bitcoin, litecoin and CryptoCurrency in general.
The factories that produce the GPU, the chip foundries that are making the chips can barely keep up with demand pre-Christmas as we saw the most recent parabolic rally starting in December. 7950's are nowhere to be found, because the factories are re-tooling and moving forward with the R9 series. And we know the 7950 would still sell like hotcakes, but the factories can't produce them, otherwise, there would not be enough raw material to produce the R9.
So yes, again and again I agree strongly, the Chinese are going to mine, and the difficulty will be impacted, but will be held back simply because the factories cannot produce enough cards, and that will spur more buying as people who want to mine, but cannot afford the ever more expensive cards, simply capitulate into a purchase of coin using fiat where they can find that opportunity.
And let's not forget the Chinese individual selling bitcoin from their laptop, or their smartphone direct for fiat, you can be certain this is happening.
So China is still in play in many ways, most notably as they will certainly ramp up mining with the high end GPU that are much more accessible to their market.
