Bitcoin and China: a love story?
Two days after we talked about this, we step upon this story. This can’t be a coincidence! China is really in love with digital currency, the numbers speak for itself. The country’s interest in the currency keeps increasing, after two months of steady growth.
China already has a specific exchange platform called BTCChina and the downloads of the original Satoshi client have risen in the last months. Take this example: in April, Chinese software downloads accounted for 13.15 percent of the total, against 3.66 percent in January.
However, between May and June, China shot toward the top of the graphs, with over one quarter of all downloads. The country even managed to surpass the USA!
“China seems to be actively encouraging its population to take it up. It is showing it on TV, and explaining to people how they can take it in payment for their business. Nothing goes on TV in China without the say-so of the party. The party never does anything officially, but if it’s on TV, it’s being endorsed”, says Johnathan Turrall, co-founder of the software company MetaLair.
Can this be another step in the “currency war” between China and the USA? After the competition between the yen and the dollar, can Bitcoin be the new bone of contention?
“I’m sure there are many people in China fascinated by money in all its various forms, and so a non-fiat money is especially interesting and the media would respond to this”, claims the professor Barry Naughton, specialized in the Chinese economy field, who teaches at UC San Diego.
However, he highly doubts that China is endorsing Bitcoin. “Also, since China’s capital account is still not open, people will be especially interested in something that might allow them more freedom with their money, including the freedom to move it offshore”, he adds. That’s sort of what we talked about in this article, where we referred that the best Bitcoin feature for the Chinese was the fact the it provided freedom when we talk about investments.
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