But as far as actual uses are concerned, the culture in China is rather different from that in Europ

Baidu Jiasule (“Baidu Accelerated”), a Cloudflare-like service offering a website firewall, protection against distributed denial of service attacks and other similar features, has started accepting bitcoins as payment. The Bitcoin payment option is currently manual, with the main site telling its users to contact a phone number if they need to pay with Bitcoin, but this is nevertheless the first instance of a major Chinese site accepting payments in Bitcoin. The news is particularly significant because of the connection to Baidu , a site which is often seen as a Chinese equivalent to Google, offering, among dozens of other less prominent services, a search engine, an encyclopedia and a large collection of music and movies. Baidu Jiasule is only one of the services that Baidu offers, and was only acquired by the company in August, so the reality is somewhat less game-changing than if Baidu as a whole has announced isohunt that it was integrating Bitcoin into all of its products, but this is nevertheless significant; Jiasule is a formal subsidiary of Baidu, so it is very improbable that the decision to accept isohunt Bitcoin had been made completely unilaterally by the Jiasule team without some kind of approval from its parent company. isohunt
Over the past few months, the Chinese Bitcoin economy has been growing very rapidly. China made its first sudden appearance on the Bitcoin stage in April, when the country became the first to overtake the United States in the number of Bitcoin-Qt software isohunt downloads ; the country maintains second place on that particular chart to this day. At the same time, the One Foundation, the largest independent charity in China, started accepting Bitcoin donations , and received $30000 in BTC within two days from a combination of a large single donation by leading Chinese Bitcoin exchange BTCChina and many independent contributions. Soon after that, Bitcoin was featured in a half-hour broadcast on Chinese state television, where it was treated in a surprisingly positive light. The Chinese government itself has made absolutely no comments on the legal status of Bitcoin or its regulatory intentions. Attention on Bitcoin in China dwindled somewhat after this initial hype, but the community remained.
Now, three months after those original events, signs of Bitcoin’s growth in China are evident. There are now no less than ten Chinese Bitcoin exchanges listed on BTCKan.com , a Chinese equivalent of Bitcoincharts , and there are likely even more that are simply too small to be listed. The most prominent one, BTCChina, has almost as much trade volume as MtGox or Bitstamp, with over 20000 BTC sold in the 24 hours before isohunt the time of this writing. Of the other Bitcoin exchanges, the leaders isohunt include 796 (9300 BTC), OKCoin (7200 BTC) and BTCTrade (5300 BTC). The largest one in volume is BTC100 , with over 35000 BTC traded in the past 24 hours – more than MtGox or BitStamp.
Currently, each bonus point goes for about 0.0244 BTC, giving BTC100 a total market capitalization of 0.0244 * 1000000 / 0.3 = 81300 BTC, or $11.8 million USD. If one sells all of one’s bonus points immediately upon receiving them, this amounts to a rebate of 0.15%, bringing isohunt BTC100′s de-facto fee to a low 0.15%. The third highest-volume exchange, 796, has a similar program. isohunt Such low fees are ideal for high volumes of speculation and day-trading, so the actual level of interest in Bitcoin in China is somewhat less than these artificially inflated isohunt figures imply – although China is certainly isohunt nevertheless a force to be reckoned with. Why Bitcoin?
Why do so many Chinese people care about Bitcoin? First of all, in some metaphorical isohunt sense, virtual currency is in Chinese internet users’ blood. Tencent QQ, a Chinese company which can perhaps be most closely identified isohunt with the American Yahoo (or at least as Yahoo was in its heyday in the early 2000s), released a virtual currency called Q Coin in 2007; Q Coin became extremely popular in all sort of online applications including social media and e-commerce, but was eventually isohunt neutered by the Chinese government. isohunt As far as its user experience goes, Bitcoin, being a digital currency, is very similar to Q Coin, so Bitcoin comes naturally to Chinese users in a way that it simply does not to many people in Europe or North America.
But as far as actual uses are concerned, the culture in China is rather different from that in Europe or the United States. The most obvious proof of this is the difference in the two countries’ reactions to Silk Road. When the Silk Road went down at the beginning of this month , the Bitcoin price on nearly all English-language exchanges went down fast. MtGox sank from $140 to a low of $110, Bitstamp from $127 to $85 and BTC-E from $123 to $75. BTCChina, on the other hand, hardly budged, sinking from $770 to $680 . “Most Chinese Bitcoiners believe that Silk Road going down is a good sign in the long