Well, thanks, I guess...    Corrections are welcome, I am trying to keep this post updated: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=178336.msg6039395#msg6039395

Well, it seems that most of the Chinese exchanges were still using bank transfers to/from corporate accounts and some form of payment through 3rd party processors (prepaid cards?) for CNY deposits and withdrawals.  Even BTC-China, which avoided banks after the December decrees, eventually started doing the same.

One by one, the exchanges are reporting now that those channels are being closed; most are suspending CNY deposits, one (BTC38) suspended also CNY withdrawals it seems, another (FXBTC) said it will stop CNY withdrawals next Sunday.

It is not clear exactly which of the two methods are closed in each case (I do not know exactly how the "cards" they use work).  However, on the whole it seems that deposits through both channels are being blocked already, it is just a matter of days; and withdrawals very probably will be blocked too soon afterwards.

The Cryptocoins News article dis not mention BTCTrade; that was one more for the list.

Thanks! But the distinguished colleague is too soft... 

As for the other distingushed colleague near the end, I agree that Bitcoin is a terrific investiment if you have a time machine.  Unfortunately most traders don't, that is why they are generally unimpressed by how much the price of something increased since Gilgamesh was king in Uruk.   

(Apologies if this has been posted already.)
From the BTCTrade site,
Google Translate:

Summary of bank transfer status from this CryptocoinsNews article

Bter:      deposits halted, withdrawals still possible.
OKCoin:    deposits and withdrawals still possible. [was here @ 22:48]
FXBTC:     bank deposits halted, bank withdrawals will be halted Sunday.
BTC38:     both deposits and withdawals suspended.
BTC-China: only 3rd party transfers suspended, not notified by banks yet. [was here @ 2014-04-02 19:31]
Huobi:     ??
ChBTC:     ??
BTCTrade:  bank deposits and withdrawals still OK? (3rd party processors halted). [was here @ 2014-04-02 20:10]
BTC100:    ??
(others?)

EDIT: BTCTrade,  BTCChina updated; OKCoin fixed per reddit post.

Apparently the PBoC note did not define a fim date for blocking deposits to the exchange acconts, so each bank is taking its own time to communicate the decision to the exchanges.  (Earlier I posted a quote from a Chinese article, someone "close to the source" saying that halting the bank transfers is more complicated than halting deposits through payment processors.)

Well, here is a "pessimistic but bullish" possibility, sort of a worst-case scenario:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=178336.msg5939081#msg5939081

The FXBTC notice was just posted here.  Also BTC38 posted something similar (hard to tell, Google Translate was quite garbled).  No news yet from OKCoin and Huobi, but it looks certain now.

The tail hated being wagged about, cursed the dog and wished its death.  The wish may be about to be granted now.

Sigh, we have been through this already with MtGOX.

Anyone who buys them will have to assume their debts.  If they are insolvent -- owing more than they can expect to earn in some reasonable term -- their net value is negative.  No sane person would want to buy something that is expected to give a net loss.  Any software they may have is more easily redone than reused.

They seemed to be quite naive about banking and their prospective marketplace.  With the price swings of the last four months, a bitcoin-based bank currently sounds as sensible as liver-flavored ice-cream.

What I saw of their early marketing must have been incomprehensible to the average Cypriot; it sounded as if its primary goal was to attract investors among bitcoin believers in the English-speaking world (including using the bitcoiner slang "fiat" for "ordinary money", without explanation)

Ditto for their recent reply to the Cyprus Central Bank warnings (which were just the standard factual and sensible warnings that all central banks have been issuing about cryptocoin investment).  It insinuated that bankers were the biggest criminals in the world -- hardly the best way to convince the Central Bank to let their bank to operate...  

 

Thanks! By the way, when did OKCoin and Huobi start operating? In bitcoinwisdom's charts, Huobi starts 01/Sep/2013, OKCoin on 12/Jun/2013 --- is that it?

Perhaps.  But I understood that the investment deal had been decided back in December? What does "closed" means?

When the rally started it was about 4:00 pm in China, and it jumped just before 5:00 pm.  Perhaps out of relief that bank hours were nearly over (they close at 5:00 pm it seems), and there were no bad news today?

The "technical issue" seems to be that they already spent all the investment money they had, lost a bunch of bitcoins on a couple of scams/crashes, made a lot of debts, have yet to get any revenue (or prospects thereof), their shares started to crash on that "stock market" where they were traded, and trading has been halted.

There is indeed a technical name for that... 

There is a thread that does just that, with the original post being updated daily:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=337486.0
By that page, they now own ~96,000 BTC, and bought ~23,000 since Jan/30
(~400 BTC/day on average).

Bitcoin in China is now like Schroedinger's cat: neither dead nor alive, until PBoC opens the box.

Huobi's volume today, 08:00 to 12:00 local time, was only 1.23 kBTC.  It has been usually 10 times as much in recent days (except on Sunday Mar/23 when they had the DDOS attack), sometimes 50x as much. 

Evereybody is waiting for news?

Thanks!

Normally I suppose that would be the case.  But imagine the extreme hypothetical case where transactions drop to zero (say, because all bitcoin owners decide to hold their coins, or all transactions happen in internal ledgers of "bitcoin banks" without actual blockchain transactions).  Would the miners "starve"? Or would they keep mining empty blocks?

(Apologies if this is a stupid question)

Could it be advantageous, in some circumstances, for the miners to collectively generate "bogus" transaction volume?

By that I mean a large number of perfectly valid transactions that merely shuffle coins between two or more addresses owned by the same miner.

Presumably there is no advantage for a single miner to do this, but what about an hypothetical mining cartel that accounted for a sizable percentage of all the mining activity?

This looks like a small bit of new news:

https://news.powerapple.com/finance_and_tech/2014/4/2/1561923.html

Google translate:

At least it seems to provide an explanation for the delay, in case the bank blockade part of the rumor is true: it is complicated for banks to implement.

EDIT: This was found by Googling "04月02日" "比特币"  ("April 02" "Bitcoin")