"Chinese ... The Bitcoin has been bid up to $6300. Have no clue why."
I'll venture a guess, the former in the statement above has to do with the latter, as I suspeck a lott of Chinese yuan/RMB are being CONverted to Bitcoin by Chinese who fear either or both a trade war or currency devaluation by China as a counter.
We saw this in India in 2017-2018 when the Rupee was getting crushed. I learnt of it from DaSun, who had a former roommate from collitch whom I had spoken with on a few occasions as his desire was to pursue a career in biotech and wanted my advice. Dude's firsty was Shashonk - a name which reminded me of the Shawshank Redemption - based on pronunciation. I'd never heard that first name before and this association was the first thing that came to my mind.
Welp, that kiddo - post-collitch - was laundering munny for his dad who lives in India via Bitcoin and also skimming profits off the transactions. His dad would CONvert Rupees into BTC from his home/biz in India and the son would then CONvert the BTC to USD and make a skim of the arbitrage.
My son axed me about this as he was CONsidering the offer from Shashonk to 'join the game and skim the profits' with him. I tole DaSun that this was nott legal and that the amounts (which were in excess of $10,000 often per transaction and were funneled into both US-based and non-US-based banking and securities accounts) needed to be reported and also had serious tax prollems, and therefore to avoid getting entangled with his ole pal's scheme. There are many legal prollems with this scheme, some of which should be apparent to all, others of which I discovered upon doing further research into it. Shashonk was advised of the legal/tax issues and evidently kept on with the Rupee-BTC-USD arbitrage scheme and he and his dad started doing the scheme for many other folks residing in India, thus expanding the 'skim take' and also their profile on any Fed/Treasury bank transaction watchlists.
AFAIK, they've nott yet been busted and I don't know if they have ceased the scheme since the fall/devaluation of the Rupee has calmed recently.
I kept my son ~OUTT of the threat zone by explaining to him the legal and tax risks and CONsequences - including to his graduate work which involves holding a USA security clearance which would nott be long for this Earth if the Feds picked up on illegal activities, especially CONcerning munny and foreign nationals. Fortunately, DaSun had at least the good judgement to axe ThisOleMan about the legal issues before he joined the scheme, which he then avoided any involvement with - including any discussions, emails, texts to Shashonk about BTC in any way (NSA vacuums up everything - and nott good idea to jeopardize a security clearance by chatting about possibly illegal CONspiracies with foreign nationals - well, unless you have your own basement homebrew mail server and a copy of BleachBit and a cloth with which to wipe it down). So this was a potential risk averted by having the good sense to axe ThisOleMan a-FOREhand.
So, after this long anecdote, the point is that the upswing in BTC could very well be due to the Chinese peeples wanting to hedge their exposure to the yuan/RMB AND to gett assets abroad in a hidden form that the PRC would presumably have difficulty tracing and CONfiscating via BTC purses as a conduit and/or reservoir of that wealth. With more trade turbulence between China and the USA and China and the EUSSR coming, it's prolly a prudent thing for Chinesevolk to do.
And when this Forex hedge/arbitrage drives up BTC, well the increase in value from holding their assets in BTC versus the RMB/yuan just feeds forward the loop and the upswing reinforces itself as the Chinese peeps keep holding more and more of their assets in the form of BTC. I bleeve some portion of the prior BTC rise to $19,000 or whatever the peak was in 2017-2018 was due to an expanding flow into BTC as the Rupee was devalued and crushed - butt that's just my $0.02 ballparkimetric guess - as I have no idea how much total Rupee-to-BTC traffick there was - butt I do know that is was spreading faast, which is why Shashonk was trying to gett his old pals into it because the news was spreading in India and he and his dad were being swamped by requests to 'can you do that for me too' and they needed more USA people to join the scheme and handle the growing demand.
Last point: although the DDers who've read my various posts over the years know that I am solidly 100 percent Central and Eastern European in heritage, many iHubbers think I am Indian based on my alias name shajander, which is a random name I thought up on the fly in a hotel room in Florida back in 2013. The closest I am to the subCONtinent is when I have tandoori chicken or curried goat at an Injun restaurant (well, and the tasty naan bread). So please refrain from PMing anti-Injun epithets to me - they do nott insult me as I am non-Injun and DaWife's only Injun heritage is from the Sauk/Fox tribe in DaUppaMidwess, nott the subCONtinent.
