Bitcoin Forum

Dear fellow china-interested and chinese bitcoiners,

I plan to contact many china/hongkong based e-shops, like dealextreme and all, to suggest them to accept payments in Bitcoin.

For me, these companies are the perfect next step for the bitcoin economy: They would greatly profit from accepting bitcoins (tiny fees, no chargebacks, potentially enlarged customer base, seting apart from competition), and Bitcoin would instantly gain a lot of publicity.

I need a bit of help to understand how economy would currently work with Bitcoin in China.
The main point would be how to exchange bitcoins to Renminbi, from a e-shop point of view.
The only two exchanges currently doing this is the chinese MtGox branch and btcchina.com. The former has several days in a row with no trades, the latter has a typical volume of less than 500 btc per day. Both seem too low for serious business, where the profit margin probably is on the low digit percent range.

- Is there a way to directly convert bitcoins to Renminbi which I didn't find?
- Converting bitcoins to USD or some other currency, is there an easy way to receive Renminbi with paying less combined fees than with paypal?

There are dozens of these e-shops. I am sure a few of them would listen to what we have to tell them. Is there a realistic way for them to gain from Bitcoin? Or is it too early yet?

Thank you for your thoughts and info!

Ente

The exchange volume between BTC and RMB is very low, because the userbase is low --nearly 10k.
So both no.

You can sell your BTC to me.  ;D

Well..

Let me know what volume you would provide.. :-P

Ente

I think you can consider to convert the BTC -> USD first, this should be beneficial. RMB is not good for business unless you need to pay salary for your employees, because it can't exchange freely in the world market. So you can exchange the bitcoins to USD in an abroad bank. If you need to pay salaries, you can transfer that certain money to China. Many large companies do like this, if they get the profit from abroad, they won't send money back in China.

So, sounds like if the merchants could run B into an EU or US bank through an existing payment processor (http://www.weusecoins.com/merchant-tools.php), it might work for them?

Seems like the way is actually to get a Chinese payment processor into the Bitcoin game first.  8)

 :)Bitcoin

1000 BTCs per month shall be a piece of cake.  ;D

Good!
Let me know when you're up for 1k per day ;-)

Ente

btcchina.com does 1k per day roughly.

For sites like dealextreme the whole worldwide bitcoin userbase is nothing but a fraction of their monthly customers I guess.

I don't think that you have to trade in RMB at MtGox, you can do it in any currency.

I would suggest to trade in USD (being the largest market) and then withdraw in RMB (or HKD), the conversion from USD will be done at the local bank. If the merchants holds USD account at their local bank, then they will be able to receive USD without the conversion costs.

The payment processor is only good if it supports the local currency.

Solution: The e-shops can use the MtGox plugin to accept BTC, then sell the BTC for USD, then withdraw their USD to a RMB account of their choice. That would be the lowest cost to accept BTC.

I think that's the way to go!
Enough volume, relatively low costs. Hopefully, with Bitcoin the immediate costs are lower than with paypal, with fees for BTC-USD and USD-RMB. We all agree on the long-term benefits, obviously ;-)

So, one of my next projects should be to get in contact with the dozen hongkong superstores!

Ente

You cannot just move some money across borders as you please when you are a registered company. You must find some way to tax this...

However I wish you all of luck!