Bitcoin Forum

How much of this is real and how much of it is just hot air causing speculators to temporarily ramp the price before another heavy drop?

Here's my take on China along with many other Asian countries lacking on personal freedoms i.e. Iran/N.Korea/etc :

1. China is not new to the bitcoin market. In fact, all of Asia has been known of bitcoin for a long time, so a large portion of the speculators/investors that were going to be into bitcoin have already entered the market.

2. Even the few investors/speculators that would enter the market still have to wait a good amount of time to transfer money in, and big brother is watching where every yuan is moving, don't be surprised if you see a knock on the door and brought in to answer questions when the government sees your money moving into a BTC exchange.

3. Asians are very big fans of speculative investments, such as buying paintings, antiques, instruments, and such, but bitcoin is purely virtual. I am very skeptical on how much confidence your average Asian investor would have in placing assets into BTC or any crypto for the matter. A question many Asians would ask is why would you invest in BTC vs gold? The idea of a non-tangible commodity is too radical for these Asian consumers and merchants.

4. There is no popular use for BTC in China as in America and Europe. Praise the soul that is brave enough to use SR in Asia. Having a package intercepted containing drugs in Asia isn't the same as it is in America/Europe. You will be sentenced to life in prison or death if caught, why make a risk that stupid when there are plenty of trusted domestic markets that are already established? I don't think majority of Chinese vendors will be willing to accept BTC either as it is a scary concept.

5. Government intervention is highly possible and probable, we've seen in the past with Q-coin that the government has and WILL get involved with an online crypto and FORCE compliance. A decentralized currency would just not fly in China, this is equivalent to painting a bullseye on your back. As an investment it is just not safe, and as a currency, it is virtually worthless.

Overall, I feel that the news coverage made by China on BTC is great for BTC overall as it spreads familiarity, but I don't expect to see as strong of a rally or bull market as when the news of BTC spread across American news outlets. The majority of the rally today can be attributed to speculators pumping their money and buying back into the market under the assumption that news in China of BTC will send the price way up.

We can see just as with the cypress news, that the number of people downloading the BTC client in Spain had little effect on price, at least not so much as speculation... How much of the money that shot the price of BTC up came from Spain? Very little. Just keep that in mind.

On the plus side, the daily downloads of the Bitcoin client has jumped to nearly 40k in China, the daily search volume for Bitcoin in Baidu (a popular search engine in China) had jumped to 40k+ yesterday, figures don't tell lie and their relevance is determined by how you interpret them. To me, it is a very positive news and should bring the price up to a while, especially on Tuesday when all the hot money finally arrives after the long long bank holidays in Japan.

Regarding your point 4, I want to add that some merchants in Taobao (the Ebay in China) are already accepting Bitcoins, so it is untrue there is no practical use of Bitcoins in China and to grow the market in China, more tv shows and media coverage like that are necessary, people got to know and learn about Bitcoin before embracing it, the show on CCTV is a good start to kick off this whole process.

Effect? The writing is on the wall: http://sourceforge.net/projects/bitcoin/files/stats/map?dates=2013-05-04

Yea, I have a hard time wrapping my mind around this, but it happened.

i think the overall sentiment from Chinese govt. is embracing the bitcoin system. it can only mean more money flowing into their country. we will probably see them being the number one producer/exporter of ASIC technology which means even more incentive for them. i wouldnt doubt if they become the highest percentage of bitcoins hashing power.

Where do you get the idea that the Chinese government 'embraces' bitcoin?

Is it because CCTV, a state owned media outlet, broadcast a special covering BTC? If that is the case, then I would say it is too early to determine what the government's stance is on BTC, but from every perspective I look at it, the government would be against it.

CCTV's censors might not fully understand BTC and allowed the special to air as the censors are probably told what type of material to censor and cryptocurrency is certainly a new enough topic that the people in charge of broadcast might not have known any better, on the flip side they might fully understand BTC and the government really might have given the go-ahead, but I really doubt this.

24k Bitcoin-QT download? WTF?!

No more than 1.5k daily before the program aired.

What happened with Q coin?

looks like the govt. has give bitcoin the go ahead

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1dosc3/im_a_chinese_born_us_citizen_heres_what_i_thought/

The CCTV programme is not any sort of official endorsement of Bitcoin. I think China is "wait and see"-ing, just like most other govts around the world. To be honest, the more exposure it gets, the more likely it is that some old grey person in some nook or cranny of the govt will decide to crack down on it.

Nice increase in downloads, but it will likely not have a significant impact on the price. BTC is not new in China among the young/tech-savvy audience.

That said, there is an exciting opportunity to capture the less tech-savvy public. Chinese *like* investing. IME, it's not like in the West, where few people trade stocks directly -- many Chinese from all walks of life are heavily into the stock market, and will lap up the opportunity to participate in a pump.

I am not really interested in the relation between this news and the price, but what long-term effect a growing bitcoin client userbase may have.

I'll believe the hype when I see btcchina volume budge even slightly. Which it hasn't.

It will take time before we see heavy buying. When you first heard about bitcoin I bet your first reaction wasn't "omg this is awesome MUST BUY NOW !!!".

First comes the search volume. Leading very quickly to client downloads. Already materializing.
Then I expect a rise in hasing power as the average chinese newcomer start earning some BTC though mining, the easiest way of acquiring BTC that anyone can do with their existing computer.

Realizing they can only get a few bitcents a day at most with their GPUs, some will head to the exchanges. Small transactions at first, to test the waters.
The whole process will take a while. A few weeks at best, more likely several months.

Can't materialize on a WE. Gotta wait for the banks to wire the money.

Something interesting to note: In the video, when showing graphs, they only showed the rise to 250, not the crash. That would hint they want people to invest

I think later on in the program they mentioned it fell down to a low of 50 in April. Plus that blurb at the end seems very cautionary. However almost everything up until the final 1 to 2 minutes was very fair to Bitcoins and even pro-Bitcoins at some point (which made up the massive bulk of the show).

There is not so hard make a bot downloading any software.

Exactly.

There's no captcha at Sourceforge.

There's two kinds of market manipulation:  financial, and psychological.  23k downloads one day - 1.5k the previous day?  Off of one TV show?  I know there's a lot of people in China, and I know they get seroiusly into their money... but still...

Ockham's Razor.  It's much easier to believe somebody is trying to manipulate market sentiment with a download bot.  Really it is.

You guys...

I should buy thousands of tinfoil hats.

It's also easy to believe that a few thousand people dled the client because they thought they could somehow just generate money with their computers. The bitcoin subreddit gets a bunch of posts by people who've just heard about bitcoins and now they want to mine some with their laptops.

Agreed. This is what initially came to mind for me as well. People just thinking easy money: run my computer.

This post just popped up on reddt. http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1dqs42/is_it_worth_it_to_bitcoin_mine/ (http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1dqs42/is_it_worth_it_to_bitcoin_mine/)

That's exactly what I'm talking about.

Seems the right question for a nb to ask. Can't see anything wrong with that. Certainly not an indicator that the TV show has no effect whatsoever.

Chinese are buying up gold like mad so gold is getting scarce. You can get it at $1450 but you won't get any. Seems only rational that some are looking at alternatives.

I'm looking at my gold dealer's site right now. I don't see any of what I typically buy sold out. What are you referring to exactly?

ya millions of people learning about bitcoins.... ya that will have zero effect on the price .... not a damn thing will change!!!  ::)

It will, but not sooner than next month.

https://i.imgur.com/KojP2Q6.png

Don't the Chinese like Linux?

Stupid bot :-) ? (doing always same HTTP/GET)

Perhaps the Linux users self identify as Windows so as to not stand out.  I would do the same if I knew my internet traffic was scrutinized as closely as theirs is.

really ? will you run windows version on linux ?

Sure, wine not?  ;D

:-) (EDIT: Frozenlock make better bot, what will download linux version too)

I don't think this China news will significantly affect the adoption rate or price.   This event reminds me of the Good Wife episode "Bitcoin for Dummies", which aired on January 16th, 2012.  It had a lot of hype leading up to it, but price dropped for months thereafter, and that was when the total daily volume in currency was around $300k USD, not $20M day USD like it is now.

http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/chart.png?width=939.6666660000001&m=mtgoxUSD&SubmitButton=Draw&r=60&i=&c=1&s=2011-12-07&e=2012-05-06&Prev=&Next=&t=S&b=&a1=&m1=10&a2=&m2=25&x=0&i1=&i2=&i3=&i4=&v=1&cv=0&ps=0&l=1&p=0&

Bitcoin also had front-page articles in WSJ, NYTimes, and most other major news sources during the bubble up, and the price has dropped since then.

The same thing happened before the first bitcoin conference.

Uhm haha no it isn't.

occam's razor implies a conspiracy theory? i don't think so.

I have the strong feeling the price is gonna rise to about 350. It's my personal assumption based some very basic and noobish TA (thanks Arepo for pointing me to learn).

To stay on the safe side, I'd say 300. And not related to the China effect.

I don't see a conspiracy.  I simply state that between two scenarios I find it more likely that market manipulation explains these 23k (now 32k) of downloads.  Market manipulation can't be simply defined as a conspiracy - it's a fact of life in any market.

If all those downloads are one guy with a possibly good (for his bitcoin trading position) idea, that's simple.  If it's 32k individual people - whose OS choice statistics, I note, are rather... ummm... skewed - that's quite complex.  Simplicity wins over complexity.

* shrug *  Give it awhile.  We'll be able to see clients popping up in China any day now, right?  If they do...

Ya, he takes occam's razor and uses it exactly how it shouldn't be used.


What's more likely? A few million people watching an item about Bitcoin and a small % is interested and downloads a Bitcoin client
or
It's a bot.

Occam's razor obviously says the first option.

You have a very, very odd way of thinking. No offense.

None taken.

+1.

There's just no way a totalitarian government will like or endorse Bitcoin.

On the other hand, they understand the power of technology, nowadays they are much more tolerant toward non-political matters, fearing being cut off from the rest of the world.

It will be very interesting to see the role Bitcoin will play in this no-black-and-white-everything-is-gray society.

That's only his impression, nothing more.

no i think a slow trickle than a major poor. no i dont think it willhappen overnight or over week but in two weeks we should see the outcome if any.

Those stats are based on the brower's user agent, not which OS the bitcoin executable is compiled for.  That looks like the stats for one specific file, not the whole project.  Since the Windows numbers are so high, I'd guess it's the exe, not the tar.gz.

Linux downloads are tough to get a count of since many people get it from their distro and many compile it themselves from git.