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From October 8, in a move that rattled the already spooked Bitcoin market, the Chinese e-commerce giant will stop selling all crucial cryptocurrency equipment.
In a statement yesterday, Alibaba said it would delist Bitcoin mining equipment offers from its platforms and prohibit sales from October 8.
“Alibaba.com will prohibit the sale of virtual currency miners in addition to the prohibition against selling virtual currencies such as Bitcoin … which include but are not limited to: hardware and software used to obtain virtual currencies such as Bitcoin miners,” the company said.
Even items such as tutorials, strategies, and software for obtaining virtual currencies such as tutorials on mining will no longer be listed and sold on the Alibaba platform.
In April, Bitcoin was nudging an all-time high of $64,000.
In May, Chinese Vice Premier Liu He told a group of finance officials that the government would “clamp down on Bitcoin mining and trading activity” as part of its goal to achieve financial stability.
And finance and banking watchdogs said that financial institutions and payment companies should not participate in any transactions related to cryptocurrency, nor should they provide crypto-related services to their clients.
The measures aren’t just about curtailing financial risk.
The computers needed for Bitcoin mining eat up a ton of computing power and electricity, raising concerns about the cost to the environment.
China was on track to generate more than 130 million metric tons of carbon emissions by 2024, according to a Nature Communications study.
That’s more than the total annual carbon emissions output from the Czech Republic and Qatar in 2016.
That kind of output is also disastrous for China’s ambitious climate plans.
President Xi Jinping has vowed to make his country carbon neutral by 2060, and the country is already struggling to contain carbon emissions from other industries.
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