Bitcoin has attracted substantial attention from large companies in China, and the development life cycle of the Bitcoin industry is discussed

Chapter 0 Introduction

There are two special news about Bitcoin this week. One is that Qihoo 360 released an advertisement about Bitcoin, claiming that if its antivirus software cannot prevent hackers from extorting money, 360 will pay up to 3 BTC. The other news is that Baidu stopped running all Bitcoin-related advertisements.

360 and Baidu are both among the largest Internet companies in mainland China. Both of them were linked to Bitcoin in the same week, which is a big advertisement for Bitcoin.

Chapter 1 360 uses Bitcoin as a PR copywriter

The news about 360 comes from its official Weibo account @360安全卫士, which is a long article.

The article is an advertisement, claiming that 360 can deal with blackmail viruses on the Internet, otherwise it will compensate users up to 3 BTC.

It is a bit strange that this advertisement mentions "3 Bitcoins (about RMB 13,000)". The article was published at 14:00 on August 24. At that time, the price of Bitcoin should be 3,860 yuan/BTC, and 3 coins should be 11,580 yuan. According to the total price of 360, the price of one Bitcoin is 4,333 yuan/BTC. This price is only available in July. This shows that 360 was definitely not planning this copy in August, and the highest price in August was not over 4,000. The earliest should be July 31, when the price fell from more than 4,300.

It seems that 360's public relations team waited at least three weeks before publishing this article.

Chapter 2 Baidu removes “Bitcoin” related keyword ads

The news from Baidu was not officially released by the company. It was a report from Bloomberg and a Twitter account @cnLedger. In fact, when searching for keywords such as "Bitcoin, Bitcoin, digital currency" on Baidu, the results are no longer full of advertisements like before, so it is judged that Baidu has removed these keyword advertisements.

But when I searched for "Bitcoin" on Baidu, the results were as follows:

The first four items are definitely not advertisements, but the fifth item "Bitcoin Exchange" and the seventh item "OKCoin" are highly suspected of being advertisements. However, they are not marked as "commercial promotion". However, one thing is certain, the scam coins and pyramid schemes in the search results are no longer on the first search page.

If I change the keyword to "Bitcoin", the search results are completely free of ads. I change it to "virtual currency", and the results are also completely free of ads. I change it to "P2P", and the first four results are marked as "commercial promotion".

This means that Baidu has indeed removed commercial promotions for keywords such as "Bitcoin", at least partially.

Chapter 3 Reasoning about these two news

The easiest and completely accurate inference is that these two giant companies have paid attention to Bitcoin. In addition, Baidu also invested in the US Bitcoin company Circle a few months ago. Bitcoin is no longer an existence that can be ignored by these two giant companies.

Secondly, we can make the following inference: 360 hopes to attract customers through Bitcoin, and Baidu is correcting its corporate image among Bitcoin users. 360 and Baidu are actually both companies with very bad images. This time they both stood up and took the initiative to associate themselves with Bitcoin, and declared war on those who use Bitcoin to do bad things. This is also a very strange thing. There is indeed reason to believe that these two giants are using Bitcoin to correct their corporate image.

The third inference is: I went to Baidu Index to compare the four keywords "Bitcoin", "P2P", "Foreign Exchange", and "Gold", and the results are as follows:

From the latest results, the popularity ranking is "P2P" > "gold" > "bitcoin" > "foreign exchange", but in the long run, the popularity of the first three words is at the same level. In other words, for Baidu, the first three keywords should be able to bring a lot of revenue, but Bitcoin is definitely a little less. But only Bitcoin ads were cleared. I have reason to speculate that this is not an active act of conscience, but forced. In addition, China is a socialism with Chinese characteristics, so it is very likely that the government is interfering behind the scenes.

The fourth inference is: Chapter 1 above inferred the time when 360 wrote the copy, which should be in July. And Baidu's decision to clean up the advertising keywords could not have been made in a few days. I boldly guess that 360 and Baidu did receive certain statements from the "relevant departments" in July, and then planned countermeasures. This also indirectly confirms the third inference.

The fifth inference is: The third and fourth inferences above both point to the guiding statement of the "relevant departments". Is this statement positive or negative for Bitcoin? From the fact that Baidu did not remove "Bitcoin Trading Network" and "OKCoin" from the first search page, and from the fact that 360 only targets hacker scams, it can be used as weak evidence to prove that this "statement" is not aimed at Bitcoin itself, but at people who use Bitcoin to do bad things.

Chapter 4 Technology Industry Life Cycle

The content of this chapter is borrowed from a book, “A Brief History of Technology: From Corsairs to Black Helicopters”, which counts the development history of the most important technologies that have changed humanity, and then summarizes a set of development life cycles that all technology industries conform to.

The life cycle of technology industry development is as follows:

The first stage is innovation. There is not much commercial activity in this stage, only a few enthusiasts try out various possibilities of technology.

The second stage is commercialization. Based on the first stage, the commercial benefits of inventions become clear. Business-minded people from all walks of life begin to figure out how to use them to make money. There are good people and bad people among them, and the entire business development is in a chaotic period.

The third stage is creative chaos. Based on the second stage, as entrepreneurs seek long-term development, the technology industry will develop from no rules to rules, and from disorder to order. Entrepreneurs begin to establish technical barriers and regulatory barriers, especially the property rights system.

The fourth stage is to formulate industry rules. In order to protect their interests and long-term development, entrepreneurs will introduce government power to formulate laws and regulations for the industry. From then on, the industry will enter a period of sustained commercial development, and bad people will be punished by law and eliminated from competition.

The development life cycle of this set of technology industries highly overlaps with technologies that have changed the form of human society, including navigation technology during the Age of Exploration, telegraph and telephone technology, and the current development of the Internet.

I learned from this book that Bitcoin, an invention that will inevitably change the form of human society, is also in line with the life cycle of the technology industry. Currently, Bitcoin has gone through the first and second stages and is pursuing the standardization of the industry in the third stage. The power of the government is also beginning to intervene. The 360, Baidu and relevant departments mentioned in the previous two chapters are one of the evidences that Bitcoin has reached the third stage of its life cycle.

However, from the controversy over the Bitcoin expansion protocol in the past two years, we can conclude that the power to formulate the Bitcoin protocol is still in the hands of the "fanatics" and "trouble makers" in the first and second stages. The formulation of the Bitcoin protocol is still basically controlled by the people who just invented Bitcoin. At present, they have formed an open source development group, the core development group - Bitcoin Core dev.

The main members of this development team are hackers, such as Peter Tod, Gmaxwell, Lukejr, etc. What's more, many of them have very strong anti-government tendencies (please note that I am not talking about "anarchism" here). These hackers and anti-government activists will never bring a technology industry into a normal state. It is precisely because of their extreme individualism and anti-government ideas that they strongly oppose the expansion of the Bitcoin block and continue to work hard to improve the anonymity of Bitcoin, just because they are afraid that the expansion will affect Bitcoin's ability to resist government censorship. Extreme individualism and anti-government are essentially anti-commercial.

But if we look at any technology that changes the form of human society, whether it is navigation technology or Internet technology, in order to ultimately make the industry bigger and stronger, it is necessary to introduce regulations, ownership, private property, etc., which inevitably require government intervention.

As Bitcoin has developed to this point, we are fortunate to see that entrepreneurs are guiding the industry into an orderly development state. This includes American Bitcoin practitioners lobbying the government on Capitol Hill, and Chinese and American entrepreneurs also funding developers to guide Bitcoin towards long-term development.

The recent news that the developers of Unlimited received $500,000 is an example of entrepreneurs guiding Bitcoin towards long-term development. Looking at the contributors to Unlimited, I found entrepreneurs, physicists, legal professionals, and many PhDs. These people are willing to guide the development of Bitcoin in a direction that is more conducive to the long-term development of the industry.

Chapter 5 Conclusion

The emergence of any new technology is driven by geeks who are obsessed with technology itself and strive to expand the scope of human knowledge. Everyone wants to escape the control of the government, and individualism prevails. Then there are good and bad people. Then entrepreneurs come on the scene, leading the technology to become an industry, and introduce government factors, establish property rights and regulations, and finally form an orderly industry.

From the Age of Discovery to the Internet, there is such a development trajectory. Bitcoin is also entering such a trajectory.