Bitcoin OG Zhu Yu: Why China won't fully liberalize cryptocurrency mining

Recently, various rumors about the liberalization of mining have begun to circulate again. As a former long-term practitioner in this field, I certainly hope that the industry can recover, but mining can only return to the state before May 21, and it is impossible to liberalize it.

What was the situation before 21 years ago? In fact, the telecommunications and economic and information technology levels did not monitor you specifically. As long as the local governments wanted to ban you, they still had many tools.

(For the sake of the local (county) economy, local agencies such as the Development and Reform Commission can still turn a blind eye 21 years later. The only hard limit is that a telecom company from another place can report you remotely (really annoying).)

Why can't we further liberalize it? Or even liberalize it completely? Because the government is not only concerned with this one thing. There are many more important things that the government is guarding against day and night.

First of all, if the withdrawal of coins is allowed after mining, then the funds can flee abroad at will, and all the blockades over the years will be in vain. To solve this problem, there must be a matching exchange (controlled by a state-owned enterprise). Only by establishing an exchange in China and cooperating with domestic mining pools, and not allowing miners to withdraw coins on the chain, and miners to cash out and pay taxes in domestic exchanges, can the intensity of foreign exchange control be maintained and the taxes from miners be collected in a real way.

(Or we can regulate global mining pools and implement different withdrawal rules for miners in different regions. Coins mined in China are not allowed to be withdrawn on the chain. But we rarely do this kind of long-arm and detailed work, and it often conflicts with the rules set by the United States. It is difficult to do and we are unwilling to do it.)

After foreign exchange controls and taxes, another problem facing state-owned exchanges and mining pools is that after the state leaves, it may never be able to ban this industry again. Has this government really understood this matter? Can it make such a decision? Many times, we cannot always stand from the perspective of old drivers. We know these things well enough, but the government does not know them well enough. They will not be so rash.