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China Times reporters Hu Jinhua and Lin Xiao reported from Shanghai and Beijing that Bitcoin, the virtual "digital currency" generated by blockchain technology, is setting off an investment frenzy in China!
On June 23, according to the latest data released by the OKcoin trading platform, the trading amplitude of Bitcoin denominated in RMB on that day exceeded 20%, reaching a maximum of 4,300 yuan per unit and a minimum of 3,500 yuan per unit, with a price difference of 800 yuan. According to a reporter from the China Times, in the past month, the trading price of Bitcoin on the platform has increased by nearly 70%, and in the past ten months, the increase has exceeded 3 times, especially in late June, with a "roller coaster" market with sharp rises and falls every day.
"Crazy capital players have taken a fancy to the speculative opportunities under the skyrocketing and plummeting prices of Bitcoin, while central banks and financial giants of various countries have taken a fancy to the blockchain technology behind Bitcoin, which may change the entire financial industry ecosystem. Global technology companies have already heard the news and studied examples of combining blockchain technology with financial application scenarios. Bitcoin is just a speculative product that has not yet been included in global financial supervision, but there is no doubt that once the distributed ledger credit mechanism represented by blockchain technology is formed and applied to all industries, a super huge industrial chain gold mine will be revealed." On June 22, at the 2016 Blockchain International Summit, Zhou Bing (pseudonym), CEO of a Shanghai blockchain startup company participating in the summit, told reporters. Crazy transactions drive blockchain fever. Although no one knows who invented Bitcoin, since its launch in November 2008, after nearly 8 years of evolution, Bitcoin transactions based on blockchain technology have been sought after by speculators and players around the world, and have reached a feverish level in China.
How big is the scale of China's Bitcoin market transactions? The latest data released by Huobi.com shows that as of 18:00 on June 19, the platform's cumulative transaction volume has exceeded 1.06 trillion yuan, which does not include data from other major domestic trading platforms such as Btcchina, okcoin, fxbtc, GODBTC, and MyCoin.
Correspondingly, blockchain technology has attracted the attention of global financial regulators since last year. On May 27 this year, Ping An of China ( 601318 , Stock Bar ) became the first financial institution in China to join the world's most well-known blockchain technology alliance R3, which focuses on researching blockchain-based financial technology solutions and has established a group of more than 40 international banking institutions, including Citibank, Bank of America , Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, UBS, Morgan Stanley and other financial institutions.
In China, the reporter also learned that alliances studying blockchain technology have begun to emerge. On April 19 this year, China's first blockchain alliance, the China Distributed Ledger Basic Protocol Alliance, was established in Beijing. The alliance was jointly initiated by 11 institutions including China Securities Inter-institutional Quotation System Co., Ltd. On May 31, the Financial Blockchain Cooperation Alliance (Shenzhen), which focuses on the application of blockchain in finance, was officially established. The alliance brings together 31 companies including WeBank, Ping An Bank ( 000001 , Stock Bar ), CMB Network, Hang Seng Electronics ( 600570 , Stock Bar ), JD Finance, Tencent, Huawei , Silver Chain Technology, Shenzhen Financial Information Service Association, etc., of which 25 are initiators and 6 institutions including Tencent and Huawei have joined as member units.
It is worth noting that at the Central Bank Digital Currency Seminar held on January 20 this year, the Central Bank Governor Zhou Xiaochuan put forward the "conjecture" of digital currency. At that time, Zhou Xiaochuan said that from the perspective of security and cost, it is an inevitable trend for paper money to be replaced by new technologies and new products.
Especially with the development of the Internet and the huge changes in payment methods around the world, the establishment of a digital currency issuance and circulation system is very necessary for the construction of financial infrastructure and the promotion of economic quality, efficiency and upgrading. On February 17 this year, Zhou Xiaochuan once again mentioned that the central bank is studying the topic of issuing "digital currency".
"Zhou Xiaochuan's idea of the country issuing digital currency is not groundless. First of all, paper money has already appeared in electronic form in China. For example, more and more people are using Alipay or WeChat Pay, and there is no trace of paper money in the entire payment process. Large cash transactions are directly conducted through bank transfers and other methods, but the technology based on the design and issuance of digital currency should be blockchain. Just like Bitcoin, it is not a legal currency, has not yet been included in supervision, and cannot be used to purchase items, but in some foreign industries such as tourism , it can be used as a means of payment. It is blockchain technology that supports the operation and transaction of Bitcoin." The head of the innovation business department of a large domestic financial group said in an interview.
However, Tang Wanshan, an analyst at China Merchants Securities ( 600999 , Stock Bar ), also pointed out that since blockchain technology is a cutting-edge technology and its application is not mature enough, the probability of traditional interbank and central clearing systems using blockchain is not high. It is more likely to apply the technology to financial innovation fields, such as online credit investigation, P2P, online acquiring, mobile payment and other fields. A new generation of Internet? At a blockchain forum held in Beijing recently, the conference hall with thousands of people was full, and the booths of many blockchain startups were surrounded by enthusiastic audiences. Most of the participants in the forum were practitioners in the financial, logistics, Internet, publishing and cultural industries. They discussed together the major changes that blockchain, as a new generation of Internet, may bring to human life.
Deng Di, chairman of Beijing Taiyi Cloud Technology Co., Ltd., pointed out that foreign countries have gone far ahead in the research and application of blockchain. Although it is not too late for us, we have been delayed. Fortunately, the management has realized this problem. At present, the financial industry and the government attach great importance to blockchain because this technology may make a huge breakthrough in social governance and financial supervision.
He said that in fact, blockchain technology has existed for more than ten years, but the reason why it has only begun to attract social attention now is the breakthrough in thinking. The future development of blockchain technology depends on people's bold breakthroughs and innovations in thinking.
Another industry insider believes that one feature of blockchain applications is that the industry needs to be organized to tackle the problem, especially the financial industry, which is a regulated industry and can more easily achieve linkage between upstream and downstream, thus forming economies of scale and enabling innovative applications of blockchain technology in industrial chains and business models.
"The problem that the first generation of the Internet solved was the decentralization of information transmission, which made the cost of information transmission close to zero. But how do you ensure that the information you transmit is true? Blockchain technology solves this problem, bringing us into an era of free and fair information. It may reconstruct the production and organizational methods of human society like the Internet." A relevant person in charge of China UnionPay said in an interview with our reporter.
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