Bitcoin Forum

Number jumped on Tuesday.

Anyone know why?


See http://bitcoinstatus.rowit.co.uk

http://bitcoinstatus.rowit.co.uk/countryHostsWeek.png

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=45996.0
recently a major China newspaper reported bitcoin

This might explain some parts of it: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=45996.0 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=45996.0)

what country is the one level with germany? and the one level with the UK? my eyes cant figure it out.

going by the numbers, ukraine

i can only speculate - ukraine has the lowest power cost in the world. maybe a major mining operation?

yes, ukraine and canada I think

This is good news. If more people start using BTC in China, then it will be a lot easier for me to transfer money from the UK to China.

Interest rates in China for 1 year fixed are 3.5% at the moment (for 2 year fixed it's 4.4%)

The Chinese love to gamble.  In casinos, on the share market.  Bitcoin offers them a great chance to have a play.  If more mainland Chinese are taking notice of bitcoin this could be great for the price.  At least it will lead to some wild price swings.

Average folks in the People's Republic of China have an even harder time preserving the value of their savings than Westerners.  They really only have the People's Bank of China  as a safe store for it, and they get an interest rate there which is less than inflation.  So alternative stores of value would be of great interest to many of them.

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/08/chinese-banks-these-things-arent-banks.html

The Chinese people were allowed to start owning gold back when gold was about $400/ounce.

Now gold is close to $2000/ounce.

Bitcoin will be yet another commodity owned by the Chinese.

Some of my friends in China heavily invested their money in shares. That's an alternative to keeping money in cash as well.

Also, the People's Bank is highly likely going to raise interest rates again, or allow the Yuan to fluctuate more.

Save in China, spend in the UK.

The Chinese stock market is just as much a crook's game as stock markets everywhere else, though.  Not where you want to be putting the majority of your savings.

If every person in China put a dollar/yuan into bitcoin => wishful thinking

Or, if games companies use bitcoin instead of their own currency for virtual goods etc, that would be cool.

Even more interesting would be if the "money crowd" here get interested they're good for absolutely insane amount of dough.

Bigpiggy or others...

In China, what is the current best resource for a Chinese noob to Bitcoin? Are there Chinese Bitcoin pages? Is there one well-designed, informative portal for them?

I REALLY want the Chinese to pick up on this - the ability for them to work around capital controls would be in high demand I'd imagine.

There is a really popular QQ group that has everything. I personally don't use it as the security risks are just too great but a lot of people here seem comfortable with the set up.

Another option is taobao.com (http://taobao.com) (Chinese ebay) that has quite a few sell listings for bitcoins and a ton of merchants that accept them (this you have to ask them about in their chat gizmo).

https://btcchina.com/ (https://btcchina.com/) Has a fairly decent blog section on their exchange that more or less hammers out for a noob what's needed.

http://weibo.com/ (http://weibo.com/) Is supposed to be fairly lively as well.

There are other sites as well but they're a bit more fringe and I wouldn't trust them in anyway.

The only thing that's really missing atm is a decent miningpool hosted on China friendly servers either in Hong Kong, Japan or Korea or actually even here. At the moment the only pool that can be stably used from here is deepbit all the others have latency issues that seriously affect overall mining performance.

What I don't quite get is why there still are latency issues to china, I haven't had any issues to Australia, Russia or Japan from Europe since like 5 years. Not that the distance makes this much difference. Could it be that the Chinese ISPs still take a somewhat "creative" approach on net-neutrality or is it really just gov't proxy B.S.?

It would also be great PR to have the Chinese gov crack down on bitcoin before the US/EU does. Whenever the Chinese gov cracks down the headlines speak of oppressive behaviour, when the US/EU does they speak of "protecting the people."

How hard is it to set up a mining pool?  I'd be happy to do site/graphic/brand design for something like that. If we have a programmer and a Chinese speaker/writer then we'd be good to go.

I am a Chinese from Hong Kong. I am only recently aware of this Bitcoin project. So I first try to setup rigs for mining, I found it is very difficult to source ATI HD5xxx cards in HK(I know they are available from Newegg or other online stores but either shipping is too expensive or not ship international and also the warranty issue). Finally, I bought two HD5850 from taobao.com (Chinese ebay). Although the store claims these XFX cards, I definitely know they are not. I can barely overclock one card to 850MHz and another one to 880MHz. Setting up a mining pool is not a easy task I believe, you need the domain registration and bandwidth and the most important thing is you may not have enough users to keep the pool running. Currently, I am mining at deepbit.net and abcpool.co

You probably got a shanzhai pair of cards  :D
This story is emblematic of so many things in China..

how's the electricity price there?

Hong Kong should be easy to get any domain registration and bandwidth, and if you have some good WOM on some suppliers of graphic cards, it will be very cheap to get direct from China, of course getting from taobao requires some skills and contacts.

Electric cost in HK is around 12 cents us$ per kwh

Why are they retrieving? Looks like they have almost vanished. Has the Great Fire Wall kicked in?

Peeps here think differently from back home. What this whole news thing has managed to do is peak some interest. 80-90% of peeps are now going to wait and see, the mere fact that they actually grabbed the client and ran it to check it out is in itself extremely promising. In 2-3 months they're going to revisit bitcoin and as we'll still be here I'm willing to bet that we'll see an insane jump in usage.
One of the key words in the tv thingy was "scam" back home most peeps would take that at face value but here peeps don't, they'll wait and see if it's safe to jump on-board and then go for it.

I will be very scare if the Chinese are in.  Who knows they can have entire factories producing bitcoins and all of us will be priced out of the markets.

I doubt it will ever come to that. At least in terms of mining. Sure there is access to dirt cheap hardware here (as in stuff you have to rebuild/resolder etc) but that's beyond the technical skills of even most geeks here as it requires more than just a soldering iron. And power prices (at least in the city I'm in) are fully comparable to the US unless you're in a residential building that gets discounted rates.
On the trading side China could be an insane plus as there are tons of peeps here with huge wads that feel bored. And bitcoins is one of the few markets that could represent a challenge to most peeps here as it doesn't receive regular news coverage here and apart from    S3052 there really isn't much going in terms of decent analysis.
Apart from that gambling sites directed at Chinese users using bitcoins could really do a ton of business as gambling is a very integrated part of the culture here.

So I know that Satoshi is potentially non-existent, but why is there next to no trading going on in currencies other than USD?  I would expect other countries to be trading just as much as USA.  Are people in other countries trading in USD?  The bitcoincharts site shows mtgox and USD still totally dominating.

I don't completely understand why the other currencies aren't trading as much, unless bitcoincharts is just missing that traffic...?

Bingo. Traders will trade where the volume is, so MtGox/USD wins. (This will probably change in the near future once the market gets efficient enough.)

Then again you aren't a nueavu riche Chinese ;D

I don't know how many times I've been grilled on anything moving in foreign capital markets. Atm a lot of peeps here (Dalian) are trading scrap plastic futures and just about anything else under the sun.

Futures and commodities trading here is amazing, you go to an exchange with a bag of cash 30+K local (minimum for trading account) and just play numbers games for a day or two and walk home with a lighter or heavier bag of cash at the end of each day. Tax transaction fees etc are all paid instantly so you walk home with you take in full.
Once you clear your buy in, it becomes almost a game. Though a lot more addictive than a game especially if you're hooked up with news services that provide news that might be slowish (preferably non English) in hitting mainstream in China but still might move the market here.

I was actually thinking of trading in Yuan a couple days ago!
The exchange rate for BTC->Yuan->USD was higher than straight BTC->USD.
This was two or three days ago though, and I haven't seen it like that again since.

If you're looking to hold currency that's bound to go up then the RMB is it. It's been slowly rising against the dollar and everything else for the last 5 years as restrictions are slowly loosened up. I believe that another round of deregulation is coming in January (purely tea leaves and what the currency futures are doing here).

I can appreciate your patriotism  ::)

Don't you think that your currency will have the same fate once the dollar is severely weakened against gold?

It's got nothing to do with patriotism.

For example, 5-10 years ago, 1 USD bought more than 120 Japanese Yen (the RMB was pegged at 8.28:1 for quite a long time). Now, 1 USD buys less than 80 JPY.

My wife's apartment in Beijing cost 400k RMB in 2000, now it's worth close to 2 million RMB.

I realize the trend. My point is in order to buy gold the rest of the world has to buy dollars.

Even better, spend dollars and don't wait for the feds to print more.

Well its a vicious cycle... The Dollar gets inflated -> gold goes up -> the world buys dollars to get in position -> dollar strengthens a little against gold -> other countries inflate their currency to compensate -> repeat.
Also the US has more gold than China.

Quite interesting. According to the Wikipedia article on gold reserves, the US has a >75% gold as share of national forex reserves, whereas China has about 1.7%. Maybe the respective governments' priorities are different.