11 ms·

Baidu now accepts Bitcoin

208 points by ferdo 13y ago

wjnc 13y ago
Someone testing automated trading systems with that title? Or, why would anyone enter the Nasdaq-ticker so prominently?
- shubb 13y ago
  Baidu[1] is a giant search engine like Google, with a market cap of 50bn, so it's not like this is a pump and dump. I suspect the poster is just a bit 'like that'. They probably put citations in their comments. Take a look at the services list in that article - they are like Google, Wikipedia, and Yahoo all rolled into one, and dominate the Chinese market. [1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baidu http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baidu
devx 13y ago
Could it be related to yesterday's announcement, and a confirmation that they were talking about Bitcoin? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6550068 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6550068
haakon 13y ago
You're supposed to pay to a bitcoin address included in their press release, and then notify them about this. For a major NASDAQ-listed company, this approach seems startlingly half hearted.
- nwh 13y ago
  Ridiculous really. You use a new address every time, a single one for a company is not the way you're supposed to do it for many reasons, not the least being that you can't tell who paid for what.
  - TomGullen 13y ago
    Can you please explain why one should use a new address each time? I keep hearing it but am not clear on why this is recommended.
    - ihsw 13y ago
      The alternative is providing the sender address so that their system can identify who paid and for how much, which results in you having to identify yourself before each and every transaction (probably through a user account setting or some other form you have to fill out). This is an extra and cumbersome step so it creates an incentive to maintain a singular and constant BTC address of your own. The rationale behind creating a new BTC recipient address for every transaction is that it doesn't matter who the sender is.
    - nwh 13y ago
      It simply just lets you know who paid you, and avoid exposing your entire revenue to everybody else to view. Additionally it makes sure that your clients aren't connected by their payments, it keeps their pseudo-anonymity.
    - clarkm 13y ago
      Would you want the balance of your bank account and its entire transaction history to be publicly accessible? That's the equivalent of only using one address for everything. When you use a separate address for each transaction, it becomes much more difficult (and in many cases impossible) to link the addresses to established entities. And even if you can, the additional knowledge gained is limited.
    - Groxx 13y ago
      Two major reasons, depends on who's telling. First and foremost is simplicity for the recipient: if wallet X contains the desired number of bitcoins, the sender paid. Unambiguously. Otherwise it's difficult to tell who sent what, since you might be sending any number of pieces of coins that all make up "your" transaction, which is complex / nigh-impossible to solve without other ways of verifying (such as including a message in the transaction). This is made even more complex if you receive many transactions from many people with a single address. Second is anonymity. If you reuse "your" wallet and it's ever connected to you, so is every transaction out of it, forever. If you value the anonymity side of Bitcoin, it's very important, but not sufficient. If you don't care about anonymity, the only other downside is that someone who gets your private key can wait until your wallet is bigger before stealing the bitcoins. If you constantly change addresses, the old private key is essentially worthless as soon as you make any transaction. Honestly that's pretty unlikely, and if they have your private key it's game over anyway, they can steal it all at any time they want.
  - johndevor 13y ago
    Yes, but fundamentally they can now take your Bitcoins and provide a service in return. That's called trade. Anything beyond that basic exchange is nice, but akin to icing on the cake.
    - nwh 13y ago
      Well no, not really. How do you know a user has paid? Sure there might be a 1BTC transaction in the last 5 minutes, but is it the user who has just paid or somebody else who hasn't contacted you yet? Such simple issues are made simple by just using Bitcoin the way it was intended.
      - deleted 13y ago
        [deleted]
  - drcode 13y ago
    The importance of unique bitcoin payment addresses is overstated. What Baidu is doing is fine, in my opinion, if their transaction volume is low. I think it is perfectly safe to have a single address and for someone to say "Hey, I just sent 66.32 btc to your payment address." In the one-in-a-thousand chance that someone else claims to have sent that money as well, you can just ask the sender to sign a message with the source address' private key. Still, I agree long term you'd save yourself extra work by setting up separate payment addresses.
    - 3pt14159 13y ago
      But it is public, all I have to do is be the first one to say that I sent them the money.
      - drcode 13y ago
        Yes, but Baidu Jiasule is an anti-DDOS system- If someone else comes along five minutes later and says they were wronged, you can just switch it over to the new person... There'd be nothing to gain by trying to cheat.
        nwh 13y ago
        How do you prove who was right? You can't if the user isn't able to sign the address, in which case it just becomes a communication race condition.
        nikolak 13y ago
        You could ask the user via email to send some small, but "unique", amount of bitcoin from that same address again and then refund it after you've verified that the person emailing you is indeed owner of that bitcoin address.
        drcode 13y ago
        Why would a user not be able to sign the address? Every wallet I'm aware of lets you prove you originated a transaction by signing against the originating address.
  - mrb 13y ago
    "you can't tell who paid for what" Actually you can. Vendors who do this require payers to use a built-in functionality in most Bitcoin wallet apps to cryptographically sign a message identifying them. However this is not very user-friendly, does not work when sending from a hosted wallet (no access to the private keys), and reduces anonymity for the vendor since everybody knows his main payment address.
- ferdo 13y ago
  It's a toe-dip in the water by a very large swimmer. A good sign for Bitcoin.
  - vargalas 13y ago
    Good sign for Bitcoin. Very good. But not as good sign for the USA.
- logicchains 13y ago
  You wouldn't think such a major search company would allow one to watch movies or listen to copyright music free of charge just by clicking the 'movies' or 'mp3' search tags, but Baidu does (at least to residents here; I'm not sure if the same is possible for people outside of China).
  - alive-or-not 13y ago
    Why would you not? Too much brainwashing TV maybe ...
    - logicchains 13y ago
      Maybe because it's hard to imagine an organisation being outside of the reach of the MPAA?
- neals 13y ago
  Interesting for us though, to see the transactions as they come and go... https://coinsheet.net/sh3vHPeZXJ https://coinsheet.net/sh3vHPeZXJ
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
lispython 13y ago
Jiasule is just a little company (service) Baidu acquired August. This decision is probably made by this independent company, not by the main company Baidu. And other services Baidu provide doesn't accept Bitcoin. I couldn't imagine any big company in China will officially accept Bitcoin in the future at all.
- waterlesscloud 13y ago
  "I couldn't imagine any big company in China will officially accept Bitcoin in the future at all." What do you base this belief on?
  - devcpp 13y ago
    I share that opinion so I'll answer. IMO, China letting control over currency just slip away is as realistic as China letting control over anything slip away. AFAIK it's still an authoritarian state. It could happen (it has a relatively free economy after all) but it's not consistent with China.
    - sillysaurus2 13y ago
      You know, I wonder what China thinks about us. Surely they don't see themselves as an authoritarian control-monger. So what do they believe we are?
      - thaumasiotes 13y ago
        > Surely they don't see themselves as an authoritarian control-monger. Why do you believe this? There's a very long chinese tradition of vesting control in the social hierarchy. "Authoritarian control-monger" may be dirty language in the US, but not everywhere.
  - lispython 13y ago
    This country is tightly controlled by the government. The Internet is an example. The GFW (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Shield_Project http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Shield_Project) surveillance all connections in China like NSA but since 10 years ago and people are used to it. Even large payment companies in China (like Alipay) could do litter about economic innovation, they have to obey the rules set by the government and bank. Any big company in China could challenge these rules by using a method which independent of any central authority in the future? I don't think so.
shocks 13y ago
Don't Baidu deliver more packages than Amazon? This is an interesting development…
- yeukhon 13y ago
  I think you are referring to alibaba. Baidu might have shipping service, but as far as I can recall, it's China's Google.
firloop 13y ago
Looking at the bitcoin address [1] Baidu posted in the press release, it looks like a whopping 0.00326169 BTC has been deposited into their wallet. I know they just set it up, but I guess I would have expected slightly more activity by now. This makes me wonder if it's more of a PR stunt than anything. I know that Reddit, after months of enabling Bitcoin as a payment option, still only got 3% of their entire revenue in Bitcoin [2]. I like the concept of bitcoin but as of now, it seems like many of these initiatives are launched by businesses to get "tech people" interested and to make news about their business. That's not a terribly bad thing though for bitcoin because businesses are still adopting it. It just would be nice to see Bitcoin used more than 2.5% of the time. [1]: http://blockchain.info/address/1NtbQKVFxAPc8mmBoWwRzhg7o3EMCBsxNg http://blockchain.info/address/1NtbQKVFxAPc8mmBoWwRzhg7o3EMC... [2]: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1dkbix/bitcoin_usage_stats_for_reddit_gold_payments_in/ http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1dkbix/bitcoin_usag...
- ekianjo 13y ago
  How do you know that they keep the bitcoins in the same place after they receive them? They could as well transfer them to other wallets.
  - evacuationdrill 13y ago
    At his link, you can see it distinguishes between total received and total balance.
  - firloop 13y ago
    "Total Received" is the amount that address has received ever. Even if they transferred the money to other wallets, the "Total Received" amount would not go down.
- phaemon 13y ago
  Up to 0.16955721 BTC now, with 10 transactions. Reddit getting 3% from Bitcoin actually sounds like quite a bit. I know there's a lot of stories about BTC, but I still think of it as a fairly obscure thing.
yeukhon 13y ago
But Bitcoin has three major problems. One is if you lose your key you won't be able to access your coins, right? And two, how is tax going work? Third, bitcoin price goes up and down so rapidly. Say the service costs 20BC today but if tomorrow's bitcoin price is $100USD instead of previous $50USD, the consumer will pay more (and vice versa Badiu might lose some money). Correct me please.
- devx 13y ago
  1) I think with future authentication technologies, this will get easier (logging in to the wallet based on a fingerprint token?). Perhaps the new FIDO standard will help here: http://www.fidoalliance.org/faqs.html http://www.fidoalliance.org/faqs.html 2) Taxes would work just like how you make money today from other sources, you have to declare them. Plus, wouldn't it be better if people wanted to pay taxes based on the marvelous "services" they get from the government, rather than having part of the money being taken away from them by force, and then the government spending it however it wishes, with little benefit for the tax payer? Seems to me that if the government had to convince people to pay up, instead of forcing them, they'd be a lot more efficient with that money spending, and a lot of waste would be reduced. 3) I think the more used Bitcoin gets, the volatility decreases. Right now if someone buys $1 million worth of Bitcoin, that could still have a pretty significant impact on the Bitcoin market. In the future, if the transactions are worth trillions of dollars, someone trading $1 million of them won't mean much.
  - cracker_jacks 13y ago
    Making taxation optional or voluntary doesn't seem like a viable system. Everyone would just pass the buck to someone else.
- anonymfus 13y ago
  If you accept bitcoins, you could just sell them all immediately.
- aqme28 13y ago
  How are those last two things necessarily different from any volatile currency?
kevcampb 13y ago
I wonder how this will end up playing with the fact that exchanging CNY is heavily restricted. Exchange services all require proof of identity to allow you to trade, and there's quite a few limits on exchange. Some details here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renminbi#Managed_float http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renminbi#Managed_float
zhoutong 13y ago
A quick translation of the Baidu Jiasule press release: "As a cutting-edge IT guy and a professional webmaster, what else can showcase our difference? The answer is that we have Bitcoin! Bitcoin, as a new electronic and digital currency, is being accepted internationally. It's also used in daily lives. You can use Bitcoin buy a cup of coffee, or easily convert it to cash. But in China, Bitcoin is still a fairly new thing. Today, we have a good news: from today, we are starting to officially accept Bitcoin as a payment method. You can use Bitcoin to buy all Baidu Jiasule services. Baidu Jiasule as an innovator in the Internet industry, is now the first cloud service provider to accept Bitcoin and give everyone a better payment method and experience."
frozenport 13y ago
Now Chinese cyber-criminals can setup load balancing with full anonymity?
bernatfp 13y ago
Not a surprise, China already has the leading exchange in terms of volume, BTCChina.
- jedunnigan 13y ago
  There are some concerns the numbers are inflated i.e. they have have no conversion fee, so they could be trading with themselves to pump up the numbers.
  - gustoffen 13y ago
    There are other indicators that this might be legit trade volume. Things like state-sponsored media exposure, the large number of Chinese bitcoin miners, and also that Chinese are already familiar with another very popular digital currency (QQ).
    - jedunnigan 13y ago
      >state-sponsored media exposure The CCTV spot wasn't state sponsored per se, but I know what you mean. >the large number of Chinese bitcoin miners Oh? Here's to hoping. I'd love it to be real.
wcoenen 13y ago
Given that there was a bitcoin rally led by the Chinese bitcoin exchanges before this news[1] and now this amateurish announcement, it seems like somebody at Baidu Jiasule is doing a pump and dump. [1] http://imgur.com/jgwRMJo http://imgur.com/jgwRMJo
- ok_craig 13y ago
  Or just a pump.
- gwern 13y ago
  An increase in transaction volume, which is what your link shows, is not a 'rally', which is a price increase.
  - wcoenen 13y ago
    That link was meant to show a suspiciously large jump in the volume of Chinese bitcoin exchanges relative to other exchanges. It wasn't intended to show the price increase. To see the price increase, you can look at any of the charts at http://bitcoincharts.com http://bitcoincharts.com. But since the exchanges strongly influence each other because of arbitrage, price charts won't tell you anything about the role of Chinese exchanges in the increase.
    - gwern 13y ago
      > That link was meant to show a suspiciously large jump in the volume of Chinese bitcoin exchanges relative to other exchanges. It wasn't intended to show the price increase. It certainly sounded like that was what you intended. A transaction volume increase is interesting, but on Reddit I have read comments stating that the exchanges in some cases have started charging no fees - which sounds like it's possible that the increases are entirely spurious and due to, say, bots going nuts.
ffrryuu 13y ago
A step towards a de-Americanized world.

208 points by ferdo 13y ago

wjnc 13y ago

Someone testing automated trading systems with that title? Or, why would anyone enter the Nasdaq-ticker so prominently?

shubb 13y ago
Baidu[1] is a giant search engine like Google, with a market cap of 50bn, so it's not like this is a pump and dump. I suspect the poster is just a bit 'like that'. They probably put citations in their comments. Take a look at the services list in that article - they are like Google, Wikipedia, and Yahoo all rolled into one, and dominate the Chinese market. [1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baidu http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baidu

devx 13y ago

Could it be related to yesterday's announcement, and a confirmation that they were talking about Bitcoin? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6550068 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6550068

haakon 13y ago

You're supposed to pay to a bitcoin address included in their press release, and then notify them about this. For a major NASDAQ-listed company, this approach seems startlingly half hearted.

nwh 13y ago
Ridiculous really. You use a new address every time, a single one for a company is not the way you're supposed to do it for many reasons, not the least being that you can't tell who paid for what.
- TomGullen 13y ago
  Can you please explain why one should use a new address each time? I keep hearing it but am not clear on why this is recommended.
  - ihsw 13y ago
    The alternative is providing the sender address so that their system can identify who paid and for how much, which results in you having to identify yourself before each and every transaction (probably through a user account setting or some other form you have to fill out). This is an extra and cumbersome step so it creates an incentive to maintain a singular and constant BTC address of your own. The rationale behind creating a new BTC recipient address for every transaction is that it doesn't matter who the sender is.
  - nwh 13y ago
    It simply just lets you know who paid you, and avoid exposing your entire revenue to everybody else to view. Additionally it makes sure that your clients aren't connected by their payments, it keeps their pseudo-anonymity.
  - clarkm 13y ago
    Would you want the balance of your bank account and its entire transaction history to be publicly accessible? That's the equivalent of only using one address for everything. When you use a separate address for each transaction, it becomes much more difficult (and in many cases impossible) to link the addresses to established entities. And even if you can, the additional knowledge gained is limited.
  - Groxx 13y ago
    Two major reasons, depends on who's telling. First and foremost is simplicity for the recipient: if wallet X contains the desired number of bitcoins, the sender paid. Unambiguously. Otherwise it's difficult to tell who sent what, since you might be sending any number of pieces of coins that all make up "your" transaction, which is complex / nigh-impossible to solve without other ways of verifying (such as including a message in the transaction). This is made even more complex if you receive many transactions from many people with a single address. Second is anonymity. If you reuse "your" wallet and it's ever connected to you, so is every transaction out of it, forever. If you value the anonymity side of Bitcoin, it's very important, but not sufficient. If you don't care about anonymity, the only other downside is that someone who gets your private key can wait until your wallet is bigger before stealing the bitcoins. If you constantly change addresses, the old private key is essentially worthless as soon as you make any transaction. Honestly that's pretty unlikely, and if they have your private key it's game over anyway, they can steal it all at any time they want.
- johndevor 13y ago
  Yes, but fundamentally they can now take your Bitcoins and provide a service in return. That's called trade. Anything beyond that basic exchange is nice, but akin to icing on the cake.
  - nwh 13y ago
    Well no, not really. How do you know a user has paid? Sure there might be a 1BTC transaction in the last 5 minutes, but is it the user who has just paid or somebody else who hasn't contacted you yet? Such simple issues are made simple by just using Bitcoin the way it was intended.
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
- drcode 13y ago
  The importance of unique bitcoin payment addresses is overstated. What Baidu is doing is fine, in my opinion, if their transaction volume is low. I think it is perfectly safe to have a single address and for someone to say "Hey, I just sent 66.32 btc to your payment address." In the one-in-a-thousand chance that someone else claims to have sent that money as well, you can just ask the sender to sign a message with the source address' private key. Still, I agree long term you'd save yourself extra work by setting up separate payment addresses.
  - 3pt14159 13y ago
    But it is public, all I have to do is be the first one to say that I sent them the money.
    - drcode 13y ago
      Yes, but Baidu Jiasule is an anti-DDOS system- If someone else comes along five minutes later and says they were wronged, you can just switch it over to the new person... There'd be nothing to gain by trying to cheat.
      - nwh 13y ago
        How do you prove who was right? You can't if the user isn't able to sign the address, in which case it just becomes a communication race condition.
        nikolak 13y ago
        You could ask the user via email to send some small, but "unique", amount of bitcoin from that same address again and then refund it after you've verified that the person emailing you is indeed owner of that bitcoin address.
        drcode 13y ago
        Why would a user not be able to sign the address? Every wallet I'm aware of lets you prove you originated a transaction by signing against the originating address.
- mrb 13y ago
  "you can't tell who paid for what" Actually you can. Vendors who do this require payers to use a built-in functionality in most Bitcoin wallet apps to cryptographically sign a message identifying them. However this is not very user-friendly, does not work when sending from a hosted wallet (no access to the private keys), and reduces anonymity for the vendor since everybody knows his main payment address.
ferdo 13y ago
It's a toe-dip in the water by a very large swimmer. A good sign for Bitcoin.
- vargalas 13y ago
  Good sign for Bitcoin. Very good. But not as good sign for the USA.
logicchains 13y ago
You wouldn't think such a major search company would allow one to watch movies or listen to copyright music free of charge just by clicking the 'movies' or 'mp3' search tags, but Baidu does (at least to residents here; I'm not sure if the same is possible for people outside of China).
- alive-or-not 13y ago
  Why would you not? Too much brainwashing TV maybe ...
  - logicchains 13y ago
    Maybe because it's hard to imagine an organisation being outside of the reach of the MPAA?
neals 13y ago
Interesting for us though, to see the transactions as they come and go... https://coinsheet.net/sh3vHPeZXJ https://coinsheet.net/sh3vHPeZXJ
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

lispython 13y ago

Jiasule is just a little company (service) Baidu acquired August. This decision is probably made by this independent company, not by the main company Baidu. And other services Baidu provide doesn't accept Bitcoin. I couldn't imagine any big company in China will officially accept Bitcoin in the future at all.

waterlesscloud 13y ago
"I couldn't imagine any big company in China will officially accept Bitcoin in the future at all." What do you base this belief on?
- devcpp 13y ago
  I share that opinion so I'll answer. IMO, China letting control over currency just slip away is as realistic as China letting control over anything slip away. AFAIK it's still an authoritarian state. It could happen (it has a relatively free economy after all) but it's not consistent with China.
  - sillysaurus2 13y ago
    You know, I wonder what China thinks about us. Surely they don't see themselves as an authoritarian control-monger. So what do they believe we are?
    - thaumasiotes 13y ago
      > Surely they don't see themselves as an authoritarian control-monger. Why do you believe this? There's a very long chinese tradition of vesting control in the social hierarchy. "Authoritarian control-monger" may be dirty language in the US, but not everywhere.
- lispython 13y ago
  This country is tightly controlled by the government. The Internet is an example. The GFW (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Shield_Project http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Shield_Project) surveillance all connections in China like NSA but since 10 years ago and people are used to it. Even large payment companies in China (like Alipay) could do litter about economic innovation, they have to obey the rules set by the government and bank. Any big company in China could challenge these rules by using a method which independent of any central authority in the future? I don't think so.

shocks 13y ago

Don't Baidu deliver more packages than Amazon? This is an interesting development…

yeukhon 13y ago
I think you are referring to alibaba. Baidu might have shipping service, but as far as I can recall, it's China's Google.

firloop 13y ago

Looking at the bitcoin address [1] Baidu posted in the press release, it looks like a whopping 0.00326169 BTC has been deposited into their wallet. I know they just set it up, but I guess I would have expected slightly more activity by now. This makes me wonder if it's more of a PR stunt than anything. I know that Reddit, after months of enabling Bitcoin as a payment option, still only got 3% of their entire revenue in Bitcoin [2]. I like the concept of bitcoin but as of now, it seems like many of these initiatives are launched by businesses to get "tech people" interested and to make news about their business. That's not a terribly bad thing though for bitcoin because businesses are still adopting it. It just would be nice to see Bitcoin used more than 2.5% of the time. [1]: http://blockchain.info/address/1NtbQKVFxAPc8mmBoWwRzhg7o3EMCBsxNg http://blockchain.info/address/1NtbQKVFxAPc8mmBoWwRzhg7o3EMC... [2]: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1dkbix/bitcoin_usage_stats_for_reddit_gold_payments_in/ http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1dkbix/bitcoin_usag...

ekianjo 13y ago
How do you know that they keep the bitcoins in the same place after they receive them? They could as well transfer them to other wallets.
- evacuationdrill 13y ago
  At his link, you can see it distinguishes between total received and total balance.
- firloop 13y ago
  "Total Received" is the amount that address has received ever. Even if they transferred the money to other wallets, the "Total Received" amount would not go down.
phaemon 13y ago
Up to 0.16955721 BTC now, with 10 transactions. Reddit getting 3% from Bitcoin actually sounds like quite a bit. I know there's a lot of stories about BTC, but I still think of it as a fairly obscure thing.

yeukhon 13y ago

But Bitcoin has three major problems. One is if you lose your key you won't be able to access your coins, right? And two, how is tax going work? Third, bitcoin price goes up and down so rapidly. Say the service costs 20BC today but if tomorrow's bitcoin price is $100USD instead of previous $50USD, the consumer will pay more (and vice versa Badiu might lose some money). Correct me please.

devx 13y ago
1) I think with future authentication technologies, this will get easier (logging in to the wallet based on a fingerprint token?). Perhaps the new FIDO standard will help here: http://www.fidoalliance.org/faqs.html http://www.fidoalliance.org/faqs.html 2) Taxes would work just like how you make money today from other sources, you have to declare them. Plus, wouldn't it be better if people wanted to pay taxes based on the marvelous "services" they get from the government, rather than having part of the money being taken away from them by force, and then the government spending it however it wishes, with little benefit for the tax payer? Seems to me that if the government had to convince people to pay up, instead of forcing them, they'd be a lot more efficient with that money spending, and a lot of waste would be reduced. 3) I think the more used Bitcoin gets, the volatility decreases. Right now if someone buys $1 million worth of Bitcoin, that could still have a pretty significant impact on the Bitcoin market. In the future, if the transactions are worth trillions of dollars, someone trading $1 million of them won't mean much.
- cracker_jacks 13y ago
  Making taxation optional or voluntary doesn't seem like a viable system. Everyone would just pass the buck to someone else.
anonymfus 13y ago
If you accept bitcoins, you could just sell them all immediately.
aqme28 13y ago
How are those last two things necessarily different from any volatile currency?

kevcampb 13y ago

I wonder how this will end up playing with the fact that exchanging CNY is heavily restricted. Exchange services all require proof of identity to allow you to trade, and there's quite a few limits on exchange. Some details here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renminbi#Managed_float http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renminbi#Managed_float

zhoutong 13y ago

A quick translation of the Baidu Jiasule press release: "As a cutting-edge IT guy and a professional webmaster, what else can showcase our difference? The answer is that we have Bitcoin! Bitcoin, as a new electronic and digital currency, is being accepted internationally. It's also used in daily lives. You can use Bitcoin buy a cup of coffee, or easily convert it to cash. But in China, Bitcoin is still a fairly new thing. Today, we have a good news: from today, we are starting to officially accept Bitcoin as a payment method. You can use Bitcoin to buy all Baidu Jiasule services. Baidu Jiasule as an innovator in the Internet industry, is now the first cloud service provider to accept Bitcoin and give everyone a better payment method and experience."

frozenport 13y ago

Now Chinese cyber-criminals can setup load balancing with full anonymity?

bernatfp 13y ago

Not a surprise, China already has the leading exchange in terms of volume, BTCChina.

jedunnigan 13y ago
There are some concerns the numbers are inflated i.e. they have have no conversion fee, so they could be trading with themselves to pump up the numbers.
- gustoffen 13y ago
  There are other indicators that this might be legit trade volume. Things like state-sponsored media exposure, the large number of Chinese bitcoin miners, and also that Chinese are already familiar with another very popular digital currency (QQ).
  - jedunnigan 13y ago
    >state-sponsored media exposure The CCTV spot wasn't state sponsored per se, but I know what you mean. >the large number of Chinese bitcoin miners Oh? Here's to hoping. I'd love it to be real.

wcoenen 13y ago

Given that there was a bitcoin rally led by the Chinese bitcoin exchanges before this news[1] and now this amateurish announcement, it seems like somebody at Baidu Jiasule is doing a pump and dump. [1] http://imgur.com/jgwRMJo http://imgur.com/jgwRMJo

ok_craig 13y ago
Or just a pump.
gwern 13y ago
An increase in transaction volume, which is what your link shows, is not a 'rally', which is a price increase.
- wcoenen 13y ago
  That link was meant to show a suspiciously large jump in the volume of Chinese bitcoin exchanges relative to other exchanges. It wasn't intended to show the price increase. To see the price increase, you can look at any of the charts at http://bitcoincharts.com http://bitcoincharts.com. But since the exchanges strongly influence each other because of arbitrage, price charts won't tell you anything about the role of Chinese exchanges in the increase.
  - gwern 13y ago
    > That link was meant to show a suspiciously large jump in the volume of Chinese bitcoin exchanges relative to other exchanges. It wasn't intended to show the price increase. It certainly sounded like that was what you intended. A transaction volume increase is interesting, but on Reddit I have read comments stating that the exchanges in some cases have started charging no fees - which sounds like it's possible that the increases are entirely spurious and due to, say, bots going nuts.

ffrryuu 13y ago

A step towards a de-Americanized world.