ViaBTC was one of the exchanges that was forced to close down their operations in China as a result of the ban. They will officially cease all operations in the country on the 30th of September. According to the statement by ViaBTC
we will officially close the website www.viabtc.com for exchange business in Mainland China on September 30th
ViaBTC has now decided that they will begin to offer their services outside of mainland China. Although most of ViaBTC's traders are based in China, they have a substantional amount of traders that are based abroad (approximately 30%). The ViaBTC chief executive Mr Yang Haipo hopes that these overseas users will continue to use the platform as it moves offshore.
ViaBTC is not just an online exchange but also operates a mining pool as well as cloud mining services. They also raised about $2.9m from Bitmain technologies in venture funding. Expanding overseas was always on their agenda prior to the capital raise.
Mining to Continue
Although China is closing down their exchanges and Bitcoin trading avenues, they have not come after bitcoin mining. This was confirmed by ViaBTC themselves as they claimed that the government had not given them any notification to halt their activity in this space. Indeed, there are many in the space that think it is unlikely china would ever consider closing down mining.
The CEO of ViaBTC thinks that cryptocurrencies will continue to be traded in China despite the recent crackdown. This is mainly as a result of how hard it can be to actually enforce a ban of this magnitude. For example, even if China is to restrict access to offshore exchanges, users can just use a VPN (Virtual Private Network) and circumvent the great firewall of China.
He also claimed that given the nature of the peer-to-peer technology of Bitcoin, as long as one computer (node) is connected to the network from China, then every computer in China can obtain the same information. This is why policing decentralised networks can be such a hard endevour.
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