What are your thoughts on BitCoin?

It's acceptable once you can control it. If you can control it better than cash, it might be mandatory. Applicable to here too.

 

Spot on the money. China's government has wanted a cashless society for a while, it means more control and more ways in which it can punish, restrict and limit it's citizens, essentially if you speak out negatively against the government or don't follow the governments orders your money will be taken from you and there is no way to hide it like physical cash.

 

Better control over criminal sector, transparency, less overhead. Contrary to popular belief, in USSR or China there were/are avenues to properly express discontent with behaviour of any members of society including the government. However, acting like an idiot will get you punished quickly. The subtle difference is often missed by outside observer - you can constructively, publicly criticize aspects of government work, you can criticize your boss publicly during monthly gathering, you can’t protest on Tyananmen with bare ass to tell the world that Xi is an idiot.. Proper avenues. Also, criminals are first to protest government oversight, naturally it’s bad for business.

 

This description is... naive. It can only come from a person who is clearly unfamiliar with how this part of the world works.

While all that is theoretically true, in reality it's much more difficult to express discontent in a way that is meaningful or that won't get one in trouble. Corrupt officials might occasionally be punished by the central government, yes, but many who try complaining about them through 'proper avenues' are at best shut down. Often, they are intimidated or bullied into submission. At times, they simply disappear.

Even in parts of East Asia where the rule of law supposedly prevails (and in China, that is still highly doubtful), there is a lot of pressure not to express discontent in any meaningful way against powerful individuals. Social hierarchy is strong, culture is strong.

 

Shocking. This is some pulp fiction about China from the 90-ies. In this day and age, comparing expenses/way of life and sources of income of any official in cashless China (and many other places in the world) is one click away. The rate of their incarceration does not depend on someone expresing or not expressing discontent, but on proper work of relevant government departments and automated systems designed to uncover inconsistencies in the income/expenses area.

So what, they have social rating, we have credit history. The principle is the same across the world because people are the same across the world. An individual acts lke an idiot and surprise surprise, he won’t get money in China, in USA, in Germany. How far will you get if you go out and express discontent about that?

 

LOL
For a brief shining moment, my local dispensary actually took credit/debit cards but then I moved and now have a cash-only local. It's not even local, I have to drive half an hour to get to it as my city does not allow any dispensaries to operate here except delivery services which I'm suspect of.

So yeah, I also only use cash for 1 thing as well.

 

This is completely different. While I do not like the idea of a credit history, that is private companies making credit pricing decisions, you can completely ignore it if you do not want to be in debt, and there is only a select set of contacts that they they consider. Your social score affects every aspect of your life, including ability to travel, work, have children (?) and much else.

 

Hahahaha. Wow, straight up, unsupported propaganda.

Okay, wu-mao shill. You earned your 50 cents. Unbelievable.

 

@Moriarte
Dude, they prevent any flee flow of information on the internet, or at least try to. Banning wikipedia?
Sure, I get that there is some critizsm allowed, and happening.
But that doesn't change that the Communist Party and its leaders are determined to control public discourse, that there is no public free speech to speak of, but yes, there is speech I guess.

Banning wikipedia seems like a good enough litmus test for - no free speech, in honest. All by itself.

 

China gives their Pulitzers in jail sentences.

 

Right. Can you ignore credit history if you want to get a loan to start a business or buy property? Sure, you can ignore credit history and the banks will ignore your attempts to put together some cash and actually achieve something in life.

Are there many avenues open to an ex-convict in the western world? How does his status affect his ability to travel, have work, have children?

No, credit history is not “completely different”, it’s the same principle - if you act good you get a cookie, if you haven’t been good by someone’s standards - sorry, no cookies. And soon enough Chinese experience of analyzing data from cctv and whatnot will be adopted in your own city. Look around, maybe it’s already there.

 

I am having a bit of a play with bitcoin, to get the hang of it. I am sending little bits about to see how it works. How environmentally damaging is this? Is it more comparable to eating a beef sausage or driving around in a coal roller?

 

I would say worse than both. A single bitcoin transaction is almost comparable to an intercontinental flight.

 

How can that be? It costs 0.00001017 BTC == £0.062 GBP to transfer from the main exchanges and ~0.0005 BTC == £3.05 GBP to transfer it via a tumbling wallet. Surely you cannot buy that much electricity for that?

[EDIT]But this seems to agree with you:

Single Transaction Footprints

Carbon Footprint
343.74 kg CO2
Equivalent to the carbon footprint of 859,339 VISA transactions or 57,289 hours of watching Youtube.

Electrical Energy
723.65 kWh
Equivalent to the power consumption of an average U.S. household over 24.46 days.

Electronic Waste
96.31 grams
Equivalent to the weight of 1.48 'C'-size batteries or 2.10 golf balls. (Find more info on e-waste here.)

[EDIT 2] Ah, what I had not gathered was that a transaction is 3 BTC, a value of
$22,617.34 today. So my little transactions were a tiny fraction of that. Still horrifically bad though.

 

The blockchain update will happen regardless of your transaction, I thought. But buying it provides price support for mining, which is very destructive.

 

I guess you could say the same about transatlantic flights.

 

Only a very small part of the transaction cost is actually funded by fees. Most of the funding is provided by the reward for miners (in bitcoin). Currently you get 12.5 BTC for mining a block in addition to the transaction fees in the block. At the current price this is around 95k USD. A block contains around 2000 transactions, so you are looking at a cost of around 50 USD / transaction. This would buy about 1 MWh of electricity and that electricity generated about half a ton of CO2. Of course, miners want to make a profit and need to spend money on hardware as well, so not the entire cost of a transaction is spend on electricity and the true amount of CO2 generated is certainly only a fraction of that. But it is safe to assume that electricity is the main cost factor, so this fraction is not small.

 

! You're very right! It adds a marginal cost to that flight, cuz of weight. Plus, price-support in general