How China is trying to keep bitcoin small

Bitcoin has been around for a little longer than ten years and during that time many opponents and many opponents have arisen. One of the biggest and strongest opponents is the second economy in the world: China.

Contents hide

1 Alipay and WeChat do not support bitcoin transactions

2 The danger of Libra

3 The end of the dollar?

4 Related posts:

Earlier this year, the People’s Bank of China (PBOC) announced that it would “block access to all domestic and foreign cryptocurrency exchanges and ICO websites.” According to the official statement, China would like to ban foreign crypto exchanges to curb trade to keep.

But now China seems to want to use a different tactic: fighting transactions.

Alipay and WeChat do not support bitcoin transactions

This week there was another nice riot in cryptoland and as usual, they take place on Twitter. The Chinese giants Alipay and WeChat contradict that they support bitcoin transactions.

Huh? Four days ago, Binance announced that they have a new service. P2P trading in Chinese yuan and ETH, BTC and USDT. Shortly after this announcement, a twitterer asked Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao if this meant that Chinese traders could use the WeChat messaging platform and also the Alipay payment platform to deposit money, to which Zhao confidently responded with a “YES”.

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The crypto community was naturally enthusiastic because these two platforms have billions of users in China. A blessing for the acceptance of bitcoin.

The joy, however, was short-lived. Alipay responded quickly to Zhao’s tweet with a tough “NO”.

NO, you cannot. https://t.co/J0YMTz3FZW
– Alipay (@Alipay) October 10, 2019

They stated that they have received various reports claiming that Alipay is used for bitcoin transactions. Alipay noted that they are closely monitoring these transactions.

A spokesperson for Alipay, Vick Li Wei:

“Alipay closely follows over-the-counter transactions to identify irregular behavior and to ensure compliance with relevant regulations. If transactions related to bitcoin or other virtual currencies are identified, we immediately stop the relevant payment services. “

Dovey Wan from Primitive Ventures offered more insights via twitter. Wan suggests that this move from WeChat and Alipay may be due to pressure from the Chinese government.

Alipay officially reaffirmed its “Prohibition of cryptocurrency OTC trading” on its Weibo today (auto translation below)
Starting from Aug, China OTC market has been slowing down quite a bit due to various actions tasks by both payment channels and local police pic.twitter.com/z3ZqzyJpvn
– Dovey Wan ? ? (@DoveyWan) October 10, 2019

In another tweet, Wan translates an announcement from WeChat into the local language.

wechat pay also followed up with an announcement to reassure “wechat will never support cryptocurrencies trading, and has never integrated with any crypto merchant
And it says “we welcome any whistle blower to report such behavior” ??? pic.twitter.com/Kj4HTupkKZ
– Dovey Wan ? ? (@DoveyWan) October 10, 2019

The danger of Libra

That Facebook announced Libra is in that respect oil on the fire. The fear that Libra could pose a threat to the Renminbi and China’s monetary sovereignty has led the People’s Bank of China (PBoC) to accelerate the development of their own digital currencies.

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All restrictions of WeChat and Alipay may be due to the fact that China wants to eliminate competition. Not coincidentally, the PBoC wants to make their digital currency available via platforms such as Alipay, WeChat and Tencent.

The end of the dollar?

Brad Garlinghouse of Ripple believes that China wants a digital currency sooner than the United States. Garlinghouse advises the US government to show balls and build its own digital currency, or to take the risk of lagging behind. He thinks that if China is earlier, the role of the dollar as a global reserve currency will be played.

In short, China is not interested in the viability of bitcoin, but sees potential in the technology.