A lot of people in the Bitcoin space are underestimating China and the Chinese government.
China is long Bitcoin. They have more Bitcoin than the US government. They also have far more power generation capacity, and asic production capacity. Over a 4 year timescale they are able to direct multiple orders of magnitude more energy at sha256 than the rest of the world combined.
In the United States, the Cantillion Pyramid is privately owned, by people who have no allegance to the USA. In China, it's under domestic control, by people who truley believe in their own civilization and want it to exist in another 5000 years.
Remember the China mining FUD? That ended when China "banned" mining. They understand that hashpower needs to be spread out.
Remember the 329 times that China has banned Bitcoin? Those are actually bans on weak hands, and shitcoins, not Bitcoin itself. Chinese aren't stupid, they are just as intelligent as anyone else. Chinese who actually understand Bitcoin don't use domestic exchanges and have never been affected by any of the bans. This is intentional.
Hong Kong lawmakers were going to follow the US KYC/AML stuff and ban retail from buying Bitcoin. Guess what, everyone pushing that idea fell silent in relative unison. Someone higher up is calling the shots and wants to use HK as some kind of proving ground.
I have heard from a trusted source in the CSDN that the eCNY wallet has commented out lines of code that call LNURL endpoints and some API that serves bitcoin block headers, transaction depths, and address balances.
According to them, the plan is that Bitcoin will be used for foreign trade alongisde USD. Domestically, the CCP is not going to let go of currency controls. But manufacturers etc will be able to convert between RMB and Bitcoin.
Foreign companies will be able to pay manufacturers with Bitcoin through the eCNY wallet. The PBOC will automatically buy this Bitcoin and issue the manufacturer with freshly printed RMB. This is also how it worked with USD in the past - the CCP is taking a leaf from Deng Xiaoping's playbook.
The eCNY wallet itself will be banned in Western nations. But it doesn't matter, because you can hook into this system with any Lightning or normal Bitcoin wallet. This system is how China gets access to hostile markets. They are taking advantage of the fact that Bitcoin is black market money, a sewer rat that cannot die.
So what is China going to do with all this Bitcoin? I wonder if Russia accepting Bitcoin for oil and gas has anything to do with it.
