1.
What will the end game of the Chinese be? They obviously have a few more things up their sleeves. My guess would be that they are waiting for the price to rise a little more before they announce the next set of restrictions or sanctions.
It seems that the current thinking is to limit access to some sites through their firewall. I found out recently that it is actually legal to bypass firewall restrictions, because the firewall "doesn't actually exist" in China.
2.
How long will it be before China needs to reverse its decision? As bitcoin usage becomes more and more widespread for legitimate uses, and most Internet sites accept bitcoins, the Chinese are going to be at a huge disadvantage if they can't sell their goods and services for bitcoins. As adoption continues to occur, the Chinese will become more and more of a closed off society. They will have to change face at some point.
At what point will that be? I'd propose three bubbles from now, or about 18 months, although it will be very difficult to ignore bitcoins very soon.
3.
I'm surprised that Bobby Lee doesn't decide one of these days to just pack it in, move to the United States, and reopen shop. His zero-fee model was doing a fine business in China, and he has more than $5m of venture capital to buy licenses and pay lawyers. There aren't any competitors for him to compete against with a similar model in the US.
If his main goal with his fee structure was to promote the adoption of bitcoins, then he did too good a job of it. He should stop pounding his head against the wall and move to some other country, where the same fee structure would cause explosive growth in a market much more friendly to him.
I would argue that a big hindrance to bitcoins is Coinbase's high fees. If someone opens a zero-fee exchange, then why not use bitcoins for purchases online instead of PayPal?
4.
Some people say that Circle's proposed service is great, but I'll believe it when I see it. All they have is some fancy video on their site. Lots of people have applied, but nobody has been able to provide any evidence at all that they have received invitations.
When Circle is available to everyone to sign up, then I'll call that a groundbreaking achievement. Until then, this is another service with a flashy website and great publicity, but nothing underneath that people can actually use.
5.
Speaking of great publicity, one of the things my co-worker noticed is how these altcoins have such great looking websites that are far out of proportion to what the coins actually provide. Look at Digitalcoin, for example: http://digitalcoin.co/. This site looks like it's for some revolutionary product that's never before seen. Then, on some back page they have links to information, which is a bitcointalk.org post.
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- Days until July 24: 67