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.
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.
While I don't think that large Chinese companies like Baidu will accept bitcoin in the near term, the exchanges in China are actually booming. Chinese traders on the bitcoin forum say that it is quite easy to get state currency on and off the exchanges (much better than the US), and apparently it is competitive enough for several exchanges to be running extended no-trading-fee promotions.
You can see Chinese bitcoin trade volumes at this site: http://btckan.com/price (Google translate, also don't forget the 0-fee promotions). I hear that a one or two of them have shady reputations, but the majority don't. Volume has been increasing, and is rivaling dollar trade volumes. So the government isn't too overbearing in this regard, it seems. The state media also ran a detailed bitcoin TV special several months back.
>This country is tightly controlled by the government.
Strange, I always hear quite the opposite. That everything is simply too big at this point and although there is the appearance of a big controlling force, there really isn't one anymore.
Above-the-counter currency-exchanges are still pretty heavily regulated by the Chinese government. See, the ongoing China scam works like this:
* traditional Chinese culture would have the children care for their parents and grandparents in their old age
* one-child policy means that each child has two parents and four grandparents to care for exclusively, so that's not going to work out so well, therefore:
* everyone saves like crazy
* the state-run banks pay negative real interest rates (less than inflation)
* the state-run banks loan to big state-owned firms at negative real interest rates (and you can do amazing things when paying for capital at negative interest rates)
* the people in charge of the state-owned firms live lavish lifestyles off the profits and provide political support for the regime
* from time to time the government has to work to suppress riots over high food prices and other consequences of inflation
This breaks down if the ordinary people can get hold of a currency that isn't full of inflation. So, capital controls limit how many dollars people can get a hold of.
Of course, Bitcoin in the mix could be interesting. Or rendered illegal. Or both.
Except people in China don't have to save money by putting it into a bank account. They find other ways to invest that beat inflation like people all over the world have to do. And currently in China, that's real estate.
Also, there is no practical limit to how much dollar you can get with yuan, it's called the grey market.
It's pretty astounding to me how Americans can still have such simplistic and misplaced views of how things works in other countries.
Entirely curious: has he posted that he is American before? Where are you getting that from, are are you generalizing about all Americans and not talking about the poster above?
Yes, I'm American. I'm also generalizing and simplifying because an in-depth analysis of the China scam is the proper subject of a Ph.D. thesis and not a HN comment. As lionspaw has noted, there are complicating factors like the property boom (/bubble) and the grey market for inflation-resistant currencies. These hamper the current capital controls but do not render them entirely useless.
> one-child policy means that each child has two parents and four grandparents to care for exclusively, so that's not going to work out so well
Some on-the-ground experience with China would indicate that the one-child policy has basically no effect on the number of children per couple. As would the international fertility stats.
Most recently, I asked a group of chinese software developers about the policy. They went around the table admitting they weren't only children.
My experience is the exact opposite. My wife and her brother are the only set of siblings among their cousins (of which there are money, because their grandparents had a massive quantity of children). The financial repercussions of disobeying the law are fairly severe, so people don't generally bypass it.
I wonder what the explanation could be for our radically different experiences. Mine is all around Beijing, is yours perhaps out somewhere less urbanized?
I wouldn't say that. My experience is all Shanghai.
Potentially it's an SES thing, but note that the fertility statistics show very low fertility for China, so a lot of only children isn't unusual overall. The conclusion that the one-child policy isn't having any effect comes from the fact that Japan and Korea have the same ultra-low fertility rate, but no one-child policy.
Japan and Korea seem like bad comparisons, since they're relatively rich. It's fairly well known (read: I don't feel like looking it up right now) that there's a strong negative correlation between wealth and birth rates. But I don't know what the right comparison would be (China is kind of incomparable) nor what the answer would be.
Perhaps the best comparison would be India, and the disparity in birth rates there is stark, but there are massive other differences as well.
Well, going by the firewall which is constantly updated and maintained, and arresting people for criticizing government officials, I would say the government at the least tries to control the country strictly.
Ever heard of Snowden, Manning, or Assange? (names from the top of my head, but the full list is endless) Besides, if someone (a regular person) were to disappear for being a dissident, you would never find out. And it would fit perfectly the US behaviour in every other matter.
I said "dissidents." All of the above three leaked classified secrets; countries like China will arrest you and subjugate you to inhumane conditions just for criticizing the government, or trying to start political change.
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.
> 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.
A copy of the GNUstep Live CD with GNUstep and all applications pre-installed on an instance of the latest version of Debian Linux.
Estimated delivery: Feb 2014
Maybe it's really a good news for Oculus, but if anyone here feel a litter melancholy?
Armadillo Aerospace run out of money and hibernate (2013), id Software had been acquired by ZeniMax Media (2009), id software President Todd Hollenshead has quit after 17 years of service (2013) and there's a long time without really big new Game.
Now John Carmack some kind of working for another company…
Wearable Computing researchers usually use a chording keyboard for typing. You could see how this work with Emacs in real life by Thad Starner (a technical lead on Google's Project Glass) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_V2i_7oX8mw
Beautiful story, but when think about the details it may misleading.
If the only object or the judgment criteria
of the quantity way is quantity, and without any deliberate practice (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Practice_(learning_method)#Deli...) why the students finally not just only develop a way to produce high quantity product?
Last month I had a chat with Raspberry Pi's founder Eben, I asked him between or beyond Raspberry Pi and Arduino, did he think there's a chance to birth other new platform? If so, what characteristics this new platform should have?
And he said "There's scope for something very powerful (almost PC-like) in the $70 price range. If I was starting a new venture today, this is where I'd aim."
They already did the teardown work well from their article, why criticize them like you care about the appearance but not the idea.