How do we get more Chinese people to Bitcoin?
182 sats \ 14 comments \ @tomlaies 20 Jul 2022 bitcoin
Recently there were news from China that the regime stopped people from withdrawing their money:
https://nitter.net/BitcoinMagazine/status/1549808472618926082?s=20&t=puEtDuQduXztpsLZBnbXYQ
(no primary source so far, if anyone finds one pls feel free to add)
It kind of does not matter if it is real or not. The people of China are innocent and at the hands of this authoritarian regime. And there are a BILLION of them. They cannot own real estate and their money is even more controlled than in western nations.
A billion of them and yet very little contribution to the Bitcoin community. This might have something to do with their harmony-seeking culture. It might have something to do with rapid economic growth and increases in quality of life (from tamped clay flooring to western lifestyle in one or two generations) obscuring the theft of inflation.
But my guess is that the huge language barrier plays a big role here. And nobody reposting information to WeChat or other Chinese social media.
We need to do something to reach the people of China.
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614 sats \ 2 replies \ @cryptocoin 20 Jul 2022
We need to do something to reach the people of China.
What likely is needed first is to re-acquire private, secure communication methods.
When the surveillance state has achieved high awareness of most everything it is looking at, then communication methods that are not visible to the surveillance systems are even more critical. Without them, participants trading in bitcoin (or promoting bitcoin) will be detected, interrogated, and made an example of.
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120 sats \ 1 reply \ @sb 21 Jul 2022
Genuine question: is an app like Sphinx Chat that runs over Lightning something that could work? Is it secure and private enough? I seem to recall a time a few months ago when Discord, Twitter, iMessage etc were all experiencing downtime but Sphinx was working.
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100 sats \ 0 replies \ @cryptocoin 21 Jul 2022
Seems like it would work, for the threat model of a casual bitcoin user / P2P trader simply trying to operate essentially below the radar.
Perhaps @paul could weigh in on where any concerns might lie.
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107 sats \ 0 replies \ @cryptocoin 20 Jul 2022
This might have something to do with their harmony-seeking culture. It might have something to do with [...]
And it might have something to do with the ban by the PBOC:
China’s central bank bans cryptocurrency transactions to avoid ‘risks’ https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/24/22691472/china-central-bank-cryptocurrency-illegal-bitcoin
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110 sats \ 0 replies \ @2bithits 20 Jul 2022
You'd be surprised how many Chinese are using BTC.
Its problems like these (blocking bank accounts) that push them to other alternatives. And as we know BTC is the best alternative.
Also, I will say my time in China I only met a few people who were into "crypto". And I tried to give some BTC to some of my friends, but they weren't interested. I think its to do with having a higher barrier due to the number of scams in all fields of life there.
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100 sats \ 0 replies \ @mikhael 21 Jul 2022
I'm not sure you understand China very well, but let me put it like this - it's a hierarchical structure of a society. Rules based, age/seniority based. From my understanding, the underlying ethos in Bitcoin is to subvert hierarchies, skirt the rules and decentralize power. This ethos is anathema to Chinese society, which lived this way for thousands of years thankyouverymuch.
The two 'cultures', if you can call a collection of memes, messages boards, talented software engineers and financial pseudo-science a 'culture', are simply incompatible. That's just how it is, and it's why China was so ahead of the curve in delegitimizing Bitcoin.
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100 sats \ 0 replies \ @rasputin 21 Jul 2022 freebie
The people of China are innocent and at the hands of this authoritarian regime.
Innocence is debatable. Their (in)actions have led them to where they are today. Ignorance? Yes. Information flows are highly restricted and frankly most people don't care.
And nobody reposting information to WeChat or other Chinese social media.
How do you propose getting around this? Social platforms are censored, but are paradoxically the way to reach most people. Posting reactionary content could lead to your bank accounts getting frozen or worse, as WeChat is tied to ID. Keyword filtering algorithms could prevent posts from being published at all. Using Tor and VPN is an alternative but is out of the question for most people due to unreliability, cost and inconvenience.
their money is even more controlled than in western nations
Yes bitcoin is facilitating capital flight by circumventing capital controls. But liquidity is low for no-KYC BTC/CNY exchanges, often with high markups compared to 'market' price. On the other hand, the UX for WeChat and Alipay is unbeatable. Cash has mostly died out and most people favour the convenience of these payment apps. It's near impossible to convince people to abandon convenience once they have gotten used to it. Even if the price is surveillance, it seems.
I believe the group of Chinese people most likely to adopt bitcoin is the educated (upper) middle-class intelligentsia, who are most likely to have some proficiency in economics and technology as well as capital to protect. There is also a large overseas Chinese population with ties back to the mainland. For example students. If you know people in these subgroups then invite them to your meet ups and orange pill them.
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5 sats \ 3 replies \ @nullcount 20 Jul 2022
How do you know they're not already embracing BTC? Seems like the country with +50% of the hashrate (pre 2021) would be pretty on board already.
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100 sats \ 2 replies \ @tomlaies OP 20 Jul 2022
Well, there are no prominent Bitcoin leaders / thought leaders from China. There are also no prominent Books translated from Chinese, big Twitter accounts or BIPs.
But maybe lots of Chinese people are secretly stacking. Not unlikely to keep a low profile in this country. But maybe not enough for a BILLION people compared to the Anglosphere, the German speaking world, the Francosphere, Africa, India, South America etc.
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103 sats \ 0 replies \ @nullcount 20 Jul 2022
We don't get to see much of what china does online. Twitter is blocked in China, BTW. Ever heard of the Great Firewall?
Just saying that holding majority hashrate for a decade is certainly a sign. Also Bitmain is still based in China. I think the people there are embracing BTC more than you give credit.
They use BTC in different ways that we might not recognize. For example, seed phrases are less popular because of the English words in BIP 39. Chinese private keys are more likely to be represented as numbers.
Someone in the English speaking BTC space should totally do a travel-documentary on this.
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100 sats \ 0 replies \ @itsrealfake 20 Jul 2022
china has more "english speakers" than the united states.
not sure there's anything keeping them from writing books in english and publishing them as anons... but it's surely a hazard to publish a book in mandarin, when the only country speaking mandarin is actively, blatantly authoritarian and violent
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Cornleone 20 Jul 2022
Gambling industry is a good gateway.
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0 sats \ 1 reply \ @selfish_gene 20 Jul 2022
ни как... страна ещё только развивается... 5г пусть делает... рано
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @moel 21 Jul 2022
You don't need 5G to use Bitcoin 🤔
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