A farewell between banks and Bitcoin

In the afternoon in Beijing, the sun is extremely bright. Although it is the sun in the north, it still feels stinging when it shines on the body. Crossing the bustling Haidian Middle Street, we are looking for the Bank of China branch located in Changyuan Tiandi Building. Almost all domestic banks have set up branches in this area, and there are also many foreign banks around, which shows that this is the financial center of Beijing. Not far away is a building called "Internet Financial Center". It was completed in 2014 and all the offices were quickly rented out. This year is called the first year of China's Internet finance. Many Internet financial companies in Beijing seem to have been established overnight, including p2p companies, online loan companies, crowdfunding companies, etc. Zhongguancun West District has become a traditional and emerging financial center. Driven by many financial companies that are not short of money, office rents have skyrocketed.

Accompanying me was Xiaoyu, a Bitcoin OTC trader who needed to open more foreign exchange quotas at the Bank of China to cope with his growing business volume. "Bitcoin is the real Internet finance." He repeatedly emphasized this point on the way. Bitcoin has become a part of finance, and the amount of funds transferred through Bitcoin has reached 50 billion US dollars each year, surpassing the traditional Western Union remittance business.

Bitcoin is universally used, and every node can send and receive Bitcoin. However, due to policy factors in various countries or the lack of local Bitcoin exchanges, not everyone can easily buy Bitcoin. Therefore, localbitcoins.com, a Bitcoin over-the-counter matching platform based on a third-party reputation platform, has risen rapidly. Every day, thousands of people around the world act as brokers, buying or selling Bitcoin on behalf of others, and earning a living by collecting fees. Xiaoyu is one of the brokers. This morning, a South African foreign trade merchant happened to entrust him to sell Bitcoin. After receiving the RMB, he paid it to a Yiwu merchant, who sold him 10,000 fishing hats.

"According to the traditional remittance method, it takes three days. So the South African businessman suggested giving Bitcoin directly to the Yiwu merchant, but the latter did not accept Bitcoin and only recognized RMB. So he needed me as a middleman to help him convert Bitcoin into RMB and pay it to his seller, which only took one hour." While queuing up to get a number at the Bank of China, Xiaoyu proudly talked about his transaction, in which he received a 2% handling fee.

The queue for numbers is very long, even at the hottest time of the day. Most of them are international students or foreign traders, "I need 10,000 yuan of British pounds," "I need to exchange 3,000 US dollars," "30,000 yuan of Thai baht, thank you." Such requests for currency exchange come one after another. A young manager of the Bank of China with a "Dai Wei" badge on his chest keeps recording pieces of paper and handing out numbers for handling business. Sometimes he looks up, spreads his hands and helplessly tells someone who wants to exchange a small country's currency, "Sorry, today's quota has been used up, you need to make an appointment for tomorrow or the day after tomorrow."

"Sorry, I don't know about this service. Which branch did you apply for it?" Dai Wei also spread his hands to Xiaoyu. It seemed that Xiaoyu had expected that the young manager was not familiar with this unpopular service, so he explained in detail that there was a contract with MoneyGram somewhere on the official website of Bank of China. After signing the contract and binding the ID card, you can process Western Union remittances from abroad through mobile banking without going to the bank branch. In the process of Bitcoin OTC trading, speed is an important sign of good service. Brokers need to quickly collect funds and quickly go to the well-known domestic exchange haobtc.com to buy Bitcoin. On the one hand, it can give customers a good experience, and on the other hand, it can also reduce losses caused by Bitcoin price fluctuations.

In this country with foreign exchange controls, each citizen can only receive 50,000 US dollars and spend 50,000 US dollars per year. Xiaoyu's foreign exchange quota has been used up long ago, and he needs more ID cards to authorize him to use foreign exchange. After some negotiations, or to be more precise, Xiaoyu stopped being polite and warned that he was ready to complain about the other party's work attitude, the young bank manager finally agreed to call the head office to inquire about the procedures for handling this business.

After the call, the bank manager said that he had never handled this business before, so he did not have the relevant application form. Finally, he apologized to Xiaoyu and promised that he could come over the next day to handle it smoothly.

Walking out of the Changyuan Tiandi Building, the most luxurious building on Haidian Middle Street is still the traditional bank building, with its grand glass doors, neatly-uniformed greeters, and luxury cars parked nearby. Everything seems full of vitality, but they are already the dinosaurs of this era. They have not yet realized the twilight projected onto the glass building.

On the way, Xiaoyu received another business, a Swede commissioned to buy 2000 dollars of Bitcoin. It is hard not to sigh that the global economy is accelerating integration, and the demand for global remittance transfer is growing day by day. Compared with the huge banks, Bitcoin is the biggest weapon.