China Won't Ban Mining According to John McAfee

There has been a lot of news out of China lately that seemed to go from bad to worse.

First there was the clamp down on Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) in the country. Then, the authorities moved onto the exchanges and all of the crypto exchanges were told to shut down. If that was not enough, there was also news that they would be shutting down P2P exchanges and restricting speech in WeChat groups.

All of these actions led many to believe that China would be moving towards closing down the country's lucrative mining farms. This would indeed be a big move given that about 70% of the global hash power is in China.

This, however, seems to have been dismissed by the avid Bitcoin enthusiast and investor, James McAfee. In a post on twitter while celebrating his birthday in Hong Kong, McAfee mentioned that he was talking with Jihan Wu about China's cryptocurrency "intent".

For those who do not know, Jihan is the owner of Bitmain, one of the largest Bitcoin mining companies in the world. It is also almost exclusively located in China with most of their mining farms.

There was the usual back and forth with some twitter users about the politics of Bitcoin. Yet, there was one person, who asked John whether China would be banning Bitcoin mining. John replied with a definitive answer

FUD or Something More

This assertion by McAfee is of course contrary to the many rumours that are floating around that the government will not stop with only the exchanges. For example, there were internal documents that were seen by a number of people that purports to show that the Chinese government may restrict access to websites such as BitFinex or Local Bitcoins.

There were also reports, according to the Wall Street journal, that Chinese officials were closing the over the counter websites. Yet, the same source for the WSJ reporter also claimed that a mining company official saw the Chinese government terminating mining companies and the pools.

Although this is currently all speculation, it may be a positive step for Bitcoin. If the Chinese regulators did indeed shut down the exchanges, other miners around the world would pick up the slack. This would mean less concentration in mining which was the original intent.

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