China Says No To Bitcoin Mining Operations Shocking Crypto World
China has recently announced that it plans to outlaw the mining of cryptocurrencies in its country. This announcement comes via a draft that was recently released on Monday disclosing the nation’s position on the cryptocurrency sector. This bitcoin mining operations news comes as somewhat of a shock to the cryptocurrency market since upwards of half of all mining takes place in China. bitcoin, the largest and most well-known , was down by 1.4 percent on Tuesday.
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The draft contains a list of industries that the Chinese government either want to encourage, restrict or eliminate. First published in 2011, the list includes cryptocurrency as one of those industries that the would like to restrict. Crypto mining often requires large amounts of energy which the Chinese government believes can be put to better use.
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The revised draft was produced by The National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC). The commission cited concerns regarding safety, pollution and resource mismanagement as a reason for doing away with cryptocurrency mining. The distributed ledger technology requires extensive use of electricity in order to conduct mining operations. These mining operations also work to process transactions for the cryptocurrency.
The commission did not disclose when they would enact their new policy against cryptocurrencies. It is possible that cryptocurrency mining operations could be phased out immediately. According to State-owned newspaper Securities Times, the draft by the commission “distinctly reflects the attitude of the country’s industrial policy.”
Cryptocurrency has fallen in disfavor with China since 2017. Regulators have sought to ban and crack down on local cryptocurrency exchanges. This new position toward cryptocurrency mining only increases the general tone of China’s already hostile position toward cryptocurrency.
bitcoin has recently rallied reaching upwards of $5000. This the highest level of the cryptocurrency has reached since November. Many observers are at a quandary as to why the sudden interest in the digital asset.
“Forkcoins,” or “Initial Fork Offerings” — alternative coins that “split off” from bitcoin — are all the rage right now.
The latest trend in the cryptocurrency world was kicked off last summer with the launch of Cash
. The bitcoin offshoot is a top 3 cryptocurrency by market cap according to websites like . Perhaps even more importantly, it is now offered by some of the world’s biggest bitcoin exchanges and wallet providers, including Coinbase, Bitstamp and Blockchain. The second bitcoin offshoot, Gold, also claimed a top 10 cryptocurrency spot seemingly out of nothing. Perhaps unsurprisingly, therefore, a series of new forkcoins has been announced over the past couple of weeks, ranging from Diamond to to and many more.
Since this week, anyone can easily create their own forkcoin with the click of a few buttons. lets users tweak bitcoin’s parameters and other properties to fork into a unique bitcoin offshoot by simply filling them in on a user-friendly website.
The service is created by a pseudonymous developer who simply goes by the name “One,” who is assisted by “Two,” Forkgen’s “social media intern.”
Two told bitcoin Magazine that the service intends to democratize the creation of bitcoin forks.
“Even leading developers have shown it is too hard to create forks of the bitcoin blockchain without making critical errors,” Two said, referring to the recent SegWit2x launch. “Forkgen creates a level playing field where anyone can easily create working forks. Then it reduces to a much simpler problem of marketing your new altcoin. More people are good at that part.”
To test the service, bitcoin Magazine decided to create our own Initial Fork Offering.
Right now, Forkgen lets users pick a name and three-letter-ticker for their forkcoin, as well as a block weight limit and a block height for the fork to take place. Additionally, Forkgen users can choose whether they want to implement replay protection to ensure no one accidentally loses their forkcoin. Further, they can opt for a mining difficulty reset to make new coins easier to mine at first. Forkgen users can also pick the letters and numbers to start the coin addresses and private keys with — and they can decide how much they want to tilt the bitcoin logo to distinguish it from the original, like bitcoin Cash did.
Given these tools, we designed our forkcoin: “bitcoin Magazine Cash,” with the ticker “BMG.” We opted for strong replay protection and a difficulty reset, to make the coin as usable as possible. The bitcoin Magazine Cash protocol will have a block weight limit of 20120501, an ode to bitcoin Magazine’s launch date (May 2012), which is also five times bigger than bitcoin’s limit. Addresses will start with a B or an M, and private keys with an i. Finally, the logo will be tilted 45 degrees counterclockwise, for no particular reason.
bitcoin Magazine Cash forked away from bitcoin at block 500400: a couple of hours before publication of this article. Anyone who held bitcoin private keys at 12 PM UTC on December 21, 2017, has now been awarded their free BMG. It should be possible to claim these coins with the bitcoin Magazine Cash software and your bitcoin private keys — though we don’t actually recommend this (for reasons explained below).
As of yet, it unclear whether any exchanges will support the fork, but Two suggests that all of them really must:
“Exchanges should be obligated to split and distribute all arbitrary fork coins despite the systems expense and security risk. Who are they to decide what makes one fork more legitimate than any other?”
Interactive Performance Art
Although the service should work, on its website Forkgen describes itself as “interactive performance art.”
A play on , a now-defunct altcoin generator, Forkgen emphasizes how easy it is to create bitcoin forks, that — like the thousands of altcoins out there — in the end are of questionable relevance. Where Coingen was created during the first big altcoin boom of 2013 and 2014 that birthed bitcoincodebase forks such as Dogecoin, Vertcoin and Viacoin, the recent trend of forkcoins is really the same thing, the Forkgen project seems to suggest.
Two ardently denied Forkgen is something akin to joke.
“This is VERY SERIOUS. Read the FAQ,” he said. “Forkgen is the embodiment of Satoshi’s True Vision™ where if big blocks are good for scaling then many chains are even better.”
Instructions and Disclaimers
Binaries for bitcoin Magazine Cash (BMG) can be downloaded here for , and . However, bitcoin Magazine cannot in any way guarantee the authenticity of these binaries that were provided by Forkgen — nor does Forkgen. Download and run the software at your own risk; and keep in mind that exposing private keys that hold value to untrusted software is a particularly bad idea.
Additionally, keep in mind that bitcoin Magazine merely created this software as an experiment; we have no intention of actually maintaining it, nor will we support bitcoin Magazine Cash in any other way.
Want to create your own bitcoin fork? With the coupon code “GreatLeaderCraig”, bitcoin Magazine readers get 50% off for the next 6 days. (Make sure to double check that this discount is really subtracted before making the payment; the Forkgen website was having some issues at the time of writing this article.)
Finally, bitcoin Magazine does not endorse using this service: We cannot guarantee the authenticity of Forkgen or its software in any way.
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On tonight’s episode of “The Crypto Show,” Jonathan Mohan and The Dollar Vigilante’s Jeff Berwick join us to discuss the recent bitcoin Cash hard fork and its ramifications. We discuss the moral validity of the decision by some of the exchanges NOT to disburse bitcoin Cash to their customers; Jonathan explores the possiblity of bitcoin “endlessly” forking through every contentious soft fork becoming a hard fork; Jeff expresses his concerns about Segwit2x but also his admiration for the free market and how it has made current circumstances probably better than could have been expected; we compare the Ethereum fork to this recent fork; and we also speculate on the long-term outcome for bitcoin, bitcoin Cash, and the the other cryptos. We get Jeff to give us a quick update on the upcoming Anarchapulco conference, and Danny gives us a brief update on the Texas bitcoin Conference in October. Both Jonathan and Jeff, as to be expected, give some very cogent answers to some difficult questions and also offer some brilliant and profound insights into the crypto space above and beyond.
