Why China is Interested in the Bitcoin

If you haven’t heard of the latest way to pay on the Internet, pay attention. Bitcoin may quickly grow to become one of the major ways to exchange currency online. This form of payment, which came to fame as the currency behind “Silk Road” the internet’s largest and most successful illegal goods website, which was shut down by authorities some months ago, and is virtually untraceable. Most of the financial community did not take the BitCoin seriously but now things are starting to look up for the digital currency. The question is, what will happen to it in the future, and why is China so interested in it.

Lawmakers in the United States are looking at the Bitcoin cautiously. They are concerned with the risks that this new form of currency offers, but in China, there have been reports on it on the national television network of the country, CCTV, as well as some other stories in the press. The interest that China has shown in this new currency has had some effect, resulting in nearly 50,000 downloads of the client per day and a grudging acceptance from some online retails. There is also a physical trading stand in Triananmen Square. One of the biggest internet companies out there, Baidu, located in China, is going to try to start using Bitcoin.

The question is, why is China moving to take advantage of this new online currency. They have done something similar before, trying to get in on the ground floor of a social currency called QQ from Tencent. The QQ had been a huge part of the Chinese economy and people gathered to trade the QQ, and shops in China even began accepting QQ as payment. Bitcoin is very difficult to trace and it has been growing in demand. It has certainly come a long way from the status as the currency of drug dealers and anarchists when it was the currency for “Silk Road.”