China and the soaring price of Bitcoin
marginalrevolution.com
China and the soaring price of Bitcoin
1–10 of 45 posts
Re: China and the soaring price of Bitcoin
#2So the question is whether BTC jumping from 200 USD to 600 USD in under two weeks is a bubble or if BTC finally found its calling in China.
Re: China and the soaring price of Bitcoin
#3Very interesting post.
But one should keep in mind that there is also the possibility that the Chinese are buying Bitcoin as an investment.
Re: China and the soaring price of Bitcoin
#4Very interesting post. But one should keep in mind that there is also the possibility that the Chinese are buying Bitcoin as an investment.
I've been calling it "speculative saving" and think that such behavior is a large portion of the Chinese bitcoin economy. I think a lot of Chinese tech workers have realized that bitcoin is a far better investment than real estate in Beijing.
Re: China and the soaring price of Bitcoin
#5Okay, so with all of the talk about how China is buying more bitcoin than anyone else, why is the transaction volume not increasing accordingly? You can see it on the coinbase graph - https://coinbase.com/charts - it's basically seen the same volume since April, with the exception of July.
Re: China and the soaring price of Bitcoin
#6"If you are long Bitcoin for any appreciable amount of time, it seems you are betting that the Chinese economy will do poorly and capital controls will remain. Then more people will be increasingly desperate to get more money out of the country. Or you may be betting that the Chinese use of Bitcoin to launder money will increase due to the mere spread of the idea, through social contagion."
That's kind of silly. Bitcoin has many uses besides bypassing currency controls.
Re: China and the soaring price of Bitcoin
#7Okay, so with all of the talk about how China is buying more bitcoin than anyone else, why is the transaction volume not increasing accordingly? You can see it on the coinbase graph - https://coinbase.com/charts - it's basically seen the same volume since April, with the exception of July.
Total output volume may be a useful metric, since people may have used a Bitcoin transaction to move Bitcoin from one exchange to another. But a large amount of Bitcoin can be sent in a single transaction.
https://blockchain.info/charts/output-volume
Another popular metric, since output volume can be pumped up by sending the same coins over and over gain, is Bitcoin Days Destroyed.
https://blockchain.info/charts/bitcoin-days-destroyed-cumula...
http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/845/what-are-bitc...
Also transactions on the exchanges don't show up in the blockchain.
Re: China and the soaring price of Bitcoin
#8I asked some colleagues (I am the only foreigner in a 500-sized web company in Beijing) and they were a bit doubful about the money laundry reason invoqued in the article.
Sure, there is a huge business in money laundering in China and, for example, contemporary art overvaluation is linked to this financial pressure. But still, this reason is not necessary to explain the hotness of BTC in China, because just summing the mass effect plus the Chinese appetence to play money-risking games is just enough.
Re: China and the soaring price of Bitcoin
#9So the question is whether BTC jumping from 200 USD to 600 USD in under two weeks is a bubble or if BTC finally found its calling in China.
Re: China and the soaring price of Bitcoin
#10Okay, so with all of the talk about how China is buying more bitcoin than anyone else, why is the transaction volume not increasing accordingly? You can see it on the coinbase graph - https://coinbase.com/charts - it's basically seen the same volume since April, with the exception of July.
More and more off-chain transactions are happening as well: moving between accounts on exchanges, or moving between accounts on sites such as Coinbase.