Now that China has banned bitcoin, is it much easier to start mining for bitcoin? China is giving up its technological lead in bitcoin.
bitcoin is actually CIAcoin
Dont confuse blockchain with bitcoin...
China cannot give up technologically lead on bitcoin any more than it could in an Excel spreadsheet
Bitcoin is not an asset, it is a tool to count assets, and what is happening right now is the individual counting units themselves are involved in speculation, people are not buying slices of an asset, they are buying and selling counting units of an accounting system...
In simple terms, Bitcoin is an online excel spreadsheet globally kept in sync by the Internet. You can also think of it like a giant shared google sheets collaborative document shared live publicly with the globe. This synchronized spreadsheet contains rows full of transaction entries logging every transaction that ever occurs. The moment the very first entry hits the first/top row of this digital excel bookkeeping ledger the virtual currency of bitcoin came into existence from nothing. Each bitcoin that comes into existence does not take an existing dollar out of circulation, its entirely an additive act and not one of substitution...
Furthermore, Bitcoin just happens to be the first tab of the spreadsheet and anyone in the world can start their very own tab and thereby ushering into existence an entirely new spreadsheet and new virtual currency. There is no limit to the amount of tabs that can be created but because bitcoin spreadsheet tab was the first tab and also the default tab, it currently enjoys the first mover advantage and the social "network effects" of popularity and adoption...
Think back to when some coworkers at your company started a football squares and passed around the paper sheet asking people to mark and buy up squares.... in the end someone won while most people lost. It was all games and fun even though real money was involved you knew that this activity never created any value nor did it generate any wealth, it merely reshuffled the existing pooled money around and redistributed it to a few.
So whenever you buy or "invest" in bitcoin you are also merely just paying someone real money to buy up individual cells or rows on the first tab of this digital excel spreadsheet. It is really just a game of hot potatoes, from bitcoins initial start at 0.01 USD per bitcoin to its recent peak of $64,000 per bitcoin, its been on average one long chain of successive buying and reselling of rows of this spreadsheet. On average in the long run each subsequent person who bought up a row of the spreadsheet was willing to pay more that what the previous owner had himself paid to previously acquire it... in other words, when the current owner of a row or rows of this spreadsheet wants to sell it to another buyer he fully hopes and expects to be able to find a new buyer willing to pay even more and thereby pocket a profit...
People talk of bitcoin as a game charger, a hedge against inflation, a safe haven, or some sort of savior of the world... how because of the rise of all cryptocurrencies its suddenly brought so much new wealth into the world or somehow unlocked so much potential...
But if you understand the fundamentals of what bitcoin actually is, an online excel spreadsheet shared globally where each row represented a transaction of buying or selling a particular row, then its crystal clear bitcoin,not unlike the football squares, was never going to solve anything... its not a storage of wealth nor is it a source of energy nor does it have any intrinsic value whatsoever...
As far as the Tulip mania analogy goes, Bitcoin is more akin to the paper buying and selling of futures contracts of an entirely fictitious made-up flower that no one has actually seen and in fact has never even existed in the first place.