06 Jan 2014 / Forbes – Bitcoins were worth nothing in 2009, when the digital cryptocurrency was first minted on the computer of its mysterious creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, who claimed to live in Japan.
Four years later the value of one Bitcoin surpassed $1,100, thanks in large part to a surge in speculative interest from China. A little-known Shanghai company called BTC China met the demand and quickly became the world’s largest Bitcoin exchange, with more than 100,000 of the virtual coins, or $100 million, traded on a single day, nearly double the market share of its closest competitor, Japan’s Mt. Gox.
BTC China attracted headlines and a $5 million investment in the fall from Silicon Valley’s Lightspeed Venture Partners as well as its China arm. But its rapid growth, and that of Bitcoin, also attracted the attention of the Chinese government.
Unwanted attention, as it turned out. In December the People’s Bank of China decreed that merchants may not accept Bitcoin and forbade banks and payment processors from converting Bitcoin into yuan. The price of Bitcoin fell below $500 in response.
Bitcoin is still widely embraced by technophiles and libertarians (and porn and pot-dealing websites) because the currency is all digital, easily transported across borders and resistant to state controls. A Bitcoin is “mined” on privately owned, specialized computing equipment and passed around by a global, peer-to-peer network of computers. Transactions are trackable, but the parties to each transaction are not. Bitcoin has attracted entrepreneurs and investors excited about its legitimate use: cutting out the middlemen in online payments. In December venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz placed the biggest Bitcoin bet so far with a $25 million investment in San Francisco’s Coinbase, a platform for buying, selling and storing Bitcoins in the U.S. “As the world becomes more digital, paying physically with bills, gold or credit cards will seem archaic. Everyone will have Bitcoins,” says BTC China CEO Bobby Lee….. Read more
http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2014/01/06/china-bites-into-bitcoin/
