This lacks the background of <i>why</i> the Chinese want to invest abroad so much. I'll try to provide a little:<p>Traditionally, In Chinese society it's expected that in your old age you will be cared for by your children. That is, you don't really need retirement savings. Thanks to social change and the one-child policy, millions of Chinese don't believe that this will work for them. So, they are facing either working until they drop (<i>if</i> they can find some place to keep working in, and that's a big if), or saving for retirement.<p>Saving for retirement is very hard because the Chinese government has intentionally made it almost impossible. The currency inflates quickly enough that storing as cash is completely pointless. There are very strong currency controls that block any investment into foreign companies -- and even into profitable parts of local ones. The internal stock market that the Chinese can invest in is a total scam. This only leaves real estate (which is believed to be in a huge bubble), and the technically illegal shadow banking system, which itself is having trouble.<p>So in summary, the Chinese middle class is flush in cash, and desperately wants to put it somewhere, <i>anywhere</i>.<p>How large of a part Bitcoin will play in this will likely depend on threatened the Chinese government will be of it. While the system is technically sound, I have little faith that it could survive the Chinese government using informants and executions against anyone taking in RMB and selling BTC. However, as of right now, most of the shadow banking system is illegal, but it's so large (nearing the GDP of the country) that the government simply doesn't dare do anything about it. Will the same happen to BTC being used to move wealth across the border?
>5. Chinese techies are used to spending an ungodly amount of time mining virtual coins in online games.<p>It's like he doesn't even know how Bitcoins work.
If I were Chinese, I'd want a cryptocurrency which:<p>1) Allowed me to "store value" in a variety of different assets (USD, various US stocks, commodities, etc.) -- NOT a single speculative currency.<p>2) Anonymous/no transaction records<p>3) Multiple issuers and thus multiple roots of trust; If I had $100k to store offshore, it wouldn't all be at risk to one entity.<p>4) Protocol designed for anonymity; wallet software or wallet providers who left no particular trace on your local machine, network traffic monitorable from your local machine, etc.<p>In short, some kind of open network of blinded token issuers, NOT bitcoin.
Well, there <i>is</i> a point for Chinese gov't to crack down on: bitcoin exchanges and businesses accepting bitcoins. After all, you need to cash them out somehow.
> 6. The government can’t track it, can’t block it, and can’t crack down on it.<p>This is a common misconception about bitcoins. In fact, bitcoin lets you track every transaction that has ever been made.
BRB, off to open a Bitcoin exchange in China ..<p>Seriously though, could it be that we're finally seeing a solution to the worlds problems, with decentralized currency become a peoples movement to remove the existing power structures?<p>Methinks if thats the case, then duh .. China is where it needs to happen most of all. For all of our sakes!