What is the national pastime of China? If you answered gambling, you probably have a few Chinese friends. What is the national pastime of Chinese business people? If you answered tax evasion, corruption and money laundering, then you’ve tried to do business in China. When a handful of businessmen merged these two pastimes, they made a fortune by building casinos in Macao. Now, the Chinese government is cracking down on Macau, but cultures don’t change—they find new outlets. Is Bitcoin the next combination of these pastimes?
I’ll be honest, until about a month ago, I hadn’t thought much about Bitcoin. It seemed like a fringe product for people to buy illicit goodies. Then, a friend forwarded me a chart of Chinese Bitcoin usage and I saw the light. Over the past two years, the Chinese went from a negligible percentage of daily Bitcoin trading volume to between 90% and 95% of the trading volume. That’s a huge increase in usage. They can’t all be buying Bath Salts and Moly and a quick google search laid out a number of creative schemes to launder money out of China using Bitcoin. The wealthy have Macau and now the peasants have Bitcoin for moving their wealth out of China.
http://www.valuewalk.com/2016/05/chinese-dominate-bitcoin-trading/
