
Baidu now accepts Bitcoin - ferdo
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=310962.0
======
zhoutong
A quick translation of the Baidu Jiasule press release:

"As a cutting-edge IT guy and a professional webmaster, what else can showcase
our difference? The answer is that we have Bitcoin!

Bitcoin, as a new electronic and digital currency, is being accepted
internationally. It's also used in daily lives. You can use Bitcoin buy a cup
of coffee, or easily convert it to cash. But in China, Bitcoin is still a
fairly new thing. Today, we have a good news: from today, we are starting to
officially accept Bitcoin as a payment method. You can use Bitcoin to buy all
Baidu Jiasule services. Baidu Jiasule as an innovator in the Internet
industry, is now the first cloud service provider to accept Bitcoin and give
everyone a better payment method and experience."

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lispython
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.

~~~
waterlesscloud
"I couldn't imagine any big company in China will officially accept Bitcoin in
the future at all."

What do you base this belief on?

~~~
lispython
This country is tightly controlled by the government.

The Internet is an example. The GFW
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Shield_Project](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Shield_Project))
surveillance all connections in China like NSA but since 10 years ago and
people are used to it.

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.

~~~
27182818284
>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.

~~~
fennecfoxen
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.

~~~
lionspaw
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.

~~~
haukilup
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?

~~~
fennecfoxen
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.

------
firloop
Looking at the bitcoin address [1] Baidu posted in the press release, it looks
like a whopping 0.00326169 BTC has been deposited into their wallet. I know
they just set it up, but I guess I would have expected slightly more activity
by now. This makes me wonder if it's more of a PR stunt than anything.

I know that Reddit, after months of enabling Bitcoin as a payment option,
still only got 3% of their entire revenue in Bitcoin [2]. I like the concept
of bitcoin but as of now, it seems like many of these initiatives are launched
by businesses to get "tech people" interested and to make news about their
business. That's not a terribly bad thing though for bitcoin because
businesses are still adopting it. It just would be nice to see Bitcoin used
more than 2.5% of the time.

[1]:
[http://blockchain.info/address/1NtbQKVFxAPc8mmBoWwRzhg7o3EMC...](http://blockchain.info/address/1NtbQKVFxAPc8mmBoWwRzhg7o3EMCBsxNg)

[2]:
[http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1dkbix/bitcoin_usag...](http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1dkbix/bitcoin_usage_stats_for_reddit_gold_payments_in/)

~~~
ekianjo
How do you know that they keep the bitcoins in the same place after they
receive them? They could as well transfer them to other wallets.

~~~
evacuationdrill
At his link, you can see it distinguishes between total received and total
balance.

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haakon
You're supposed to pay to a bitcoin address included in their press release,
and then notify them about this. For a major NASDAQ-listed company, this
approach seems startlingly half hearted.

~~~
nwh
Ridiculous really. You use a new address every time, a single one for a
company is not the way you're supposed to do it for many reasons, not the
least being that you can't tell who paid for what.

~~~
TomGullen
Can you please explain why one should use a new address each time? I keep
hearing it but am not clear on why this is recommended.

~~~
ihsw
The alternative is providing the _sender_ address so that their system can
identify who paid and for how much, which results in you having to identify
yourself before each and every transaction (probably through a user account
setting or some other form you have to fill out). This is an extra and
cumbersome step so it creates an incentive to maintain a singular and constant
BTC address of your own.

The rationale behind creating a new BTC recipient address for every
transaction is that it doesn't matter who the _sender_ is.

------
devx
Could it be related to yesterday's announcement, and a confirmation that they
were talking about Bitcoin?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6550068](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6550068)

------
wcoenen
Given that there was a bitcoin rally led by the Chinese bitcoin exchanges
_before_ this news[1] and now this amateurish announcement, it seems like
somebody at Baidu Jiasule is doing a pump and dump.

[1] [http://imgur.com/jgwRMJo](http://imgur.com/jgwRMJo)

~~~
gwern
An increase in transaction volume, which is what your link shows, is not a
'rally', which is a price increase.

~~~
wcoenen
That link was meant to show a suspiciously large jump in the volume of Chinese
bitcoin exchanges relative to other exchanges. It wasn't intended to show the
price increase.

To see the price increase, you can look at any of the charts at
[http://bitcoincharts.com](http://bitcoincharts.com). But since the exchanges
strongly influence each other because of arbitrage, price charts won't tell
you anything about the role of Chinese exchanges in the increase.

~~~
gwern
> That link was meant to show a suspiciously large jump in the volume of
> Chinese bitcoin exchanges relative to other exchanges. It wasn't intended to
> show the price increase.

It certainly sounded like that was what you intended. A transaction volume
increase is interesting, but on Reddit I have read comments stating that the
exchanges in some cases have started charging no fees - which sounds like it's
possible that the increases are entirely spurious and due to, say, bots going
nuts.

------
wjnc
Someone testing automated trading systems with that title? Or, why would
anyone enter the Nasdaq-ticker so prominently?

~~~
shubb
Baidu[1] is a giant search engine like Google, with a market cap of 50bn, so
it's not like this is a pump and dump. I suspect the poster is just a bit
'like that'. They probably put citations in their comments.

Take a look at the services list in that article - they are like Google,
Wikipedia, and Yahoo all rolled into one, and dominate the Chinese market.

[1][http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baidu](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baidu)

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kevcampb
I wonder how this will end up playing with the fact that exchanging CNY is
heavily restricted. Exchange services all require proof of identity to allow
you to trade, and there's quite a few limits on exchange.

Some details here:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renminbi#Managed_float](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renminbi#Managed_float)

------
shocks
Don't Baidu deliver more packages than __Amazon __? This is an interesting
development…

~~~
yeukhon
I think you are referring to alibaba. Baidu might have shipping service, but
as far as I can recall, it's China's Google.

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bernatfp
Not a surprise, China already has the leading exchange in terms of volume,
BTCChina.

~~~
jedunnigan
There are some concerns the numbers are inflated i.e. they have have no
conversion fee, so they could be trading with themselves to pump up the
numbers.

~~~
gustoffen
There are other indicators that this might be legit trade volume. Things like
state-sponsored media exposure, the large number of Chinese bitcoin miners,
and also that Chinese are already familiar with another very popular digital
currency (QQ).

~~~
jedunnigan
>state-sponsored media exposure

The CCTV spot wasn't state sponsored per se, but I know what you mean.

>the large number of Chinese bitcoin miners

Oh?

Here's to hoping. I'd love it to be real.

------
frozenport
Now Chinese cyber-criminals can setup load balancing with full anonymity?

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yeukhon
But Bitcoin has three major problems. One is if you lose your key you won't be
able to access your coins, right? And two, how is tax going work? Third,
bitcoin price goes up and down so rapidly. Say the service costs 20BC today
but if tomorrow's bitcoin price is $100USD instead of previous $50USD, the
consumer will pay more (and vice versa Badiu might lose some money).

Correct me please.

~~~
devx
1) I think with future authentication technologies, this will get easier
(logging in to the wallet based on a fingerprint token?). Perhaps the new FIDO
standard will help here:
[http://www.fidoalliance.org/faqs.html](http://www.fidoalliance.org/faqs.html)

2) Taxes would work just like how you make money today from other sources, you
have to declare them. Plus, wouldn't it be better if people _wanted_ to pay
taxes based on the marvelous "services" they get from the government, rather
than having part of the money being taken away from them by force, and then
the government spending it however it wishes, with little benefit for the tax
payer? Seems to me that if the government had to _convince_ people to pay up,
instead of forcing them, they'd be a lot more efficient with that money
spending, and a lot of waste would be reduced.

3) I think the more used Bitcoin gets, the volatility decreases. Right now if
someone buys $1 million worth of Bitcoin, that could still have a pretty
significant impact on the Bitcoin market. In the future, if the transactions
are worth trillions of dollars, someone trading $1 million of them won't mean
much.

~~~
cracker_jacks
Making taxation optional or voluntary doesn't seem like a viable system.
Everyone would just pass the buck to someone else.

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ffrryuu
A step towards a de-Americanized world.

