I was a long time BtcChina user and only noticed BTCChina's withdraw voucher a few days ago:
Quote:
"Withdrawal to BTCC Voucher is our latest withdrawal method. CNY can be withdrawn into voucher codes and given to others to fund their BTC China account."
"The voucher consists of two parts: A part is for verification of the amount and validity of the code and can be given to others to prove you have the code. The buyer of the code will need to input both codes to fund their account."
The volucher, or "promise-to-pay", is essential to the fractional-reserve system banks use. An easy way to check the value of these promises, is to see how they are traded on black-market. Right now, there doesn't seems to be a black market for these voluchers, at least not found with a search engine. The reason could be that withdrawing cash is as easy as withdrawing the voucher, thus there is no market, and the volucher's value is 100% of the reach cash. This may not hold true in the long run.
Can anyone reveal when is your last withdraw from BtcChina and how many days it took?There is a reason why BtcChina wishes to issue volcuhers: that it removes the 0.5% transaction fee involved in cash-withdraw. But, few should need it. If I wish to give fiat money to someone-else's account on the same exchange, I would exchange my fiat with bitcoins, transfer the coins, and ask him to change it back. With Btc-E the cost is 0.2% trade fee two times, that is 0.4%. With BtcChina, with their liquidity rebate, you can do it with two times ±0.3% fee (yes, you may gain instead of pay).
So the voucher service is useful to a very limited extent. With so many things going around it is a bit strange BtcChina would spend some energy doing the feature. The only other rational execuse is that those who have fiat account on their account can sell the deposite service to others, thus working around the lack of online deposite measurements - e.g. China's alipay, the world's largest payment service (the second largest being paypal) refused to help process bitcoin payment. But I didn't see such activity going on yet.
How much would you weight 'withdraw voucher' as a possibility of insolvency? 20%? 50%? And
is there any other exchange issuing promise-to-pay in-place of or along with real payment?P.S. I reveal this: Back a few months ago, my BtcChina withdraw was processed in 2 days; while in MtGox I requested cash withdraw for more than 5 months, and canceled my withdraw because the account to receive it expired before I my withdraw can be processed.
P.S. It is a well known culture in China Mainland that if you have trouble in your business you should conseal it. Honesty doesn't receive much praise here, not until the two very recent years. I am concerned that we don't have much bitcoin larceny story in China yet. It's too quiet, the probability is highly against it. In other words, some exchange was hacked and coin stolen, we don't know who.
