Baidu now accepts Bitcoin

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=310962.0

by ferdo • 13 years ago

208 104 13 years ago

bitcointalk.org

devx2• 13 years ago

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

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6550068

wjnc• 13 years ago

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

shubb• 13 years ago

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

haakon• 13 years ago

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.

nwh4• 13 years ago

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.

TomGullen2• 13 years ago

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.

johndevor• 13 years ago

Yes, but fundamentally they can now take your Bitcoins and provide a service in return. That's called trade. Anything beyond that basic exchange is nice, but akin to icing on the cake.

drcode5• 13 years ago

The importance of unique bitcoin payment addresses is overstated. What Baidu is doing is fine, in my opinion, if their transaction volume is low.

I think it is perfectly safe to have a single address and for someone to say "Hey, I just sent 66.32 btc to your payment address."

In the one-in-a-thousand chance that someone else claims to have sent that money as well, you can just ask the sender to sign a message with the source address' private key.

Still, I agree long term you'd save yourself extra work by setting up separate payment addresses.

mrb• 13 years ago

"you can't tell who paid for what"

Actually you can. Vendors who do this require payers to use a built-in functionality in most Bitcoin wallet apps to cryptographically sign a message identifying them.

However this is not very user-friendly, does not work when sending from a hosted wallet (no access to the private keys), and reduces anonymity for the vendor since everybody knows his main payment address.

ferdo2• 13 years ago

It's a toe-dip in the water by a very large swimmer. A good sign for Bitcoin.

vargalas• 13 years ago

Good sign for Bitcoin. Very good. But not as good sign for the USA.

logicchains2• 13 years ago

You wouldn't think such a major search company would allow one to watch movies or listen to copyright music free of charge just by clicking the 'movies' or 'mp3' search tags, but Baidu does (at least to residents here; I'm not sure if the same is possible for people outside of China).

alive-or-not• 13 years ago

Why would you not? Too much brainwashing TV maybe ...

neals• 13 years ago

Interesting for us though, to see the transactions as they come and go... https://coinsheet.net/sh3vHPeZXJ

lispython2• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

"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?

devcpp• 13 years ago

I share that opinion so I'll answer. IMO, China letting control over currency just slip away is as realistic as China letting control over anything slip away. AFAIK it's still an authoritarian state. It could happen (it has a relatively free economy after all) but it's not consistent with China.

lispython2• 13 years ago

This country is tightly controlled by the government.

The Internet is an example. The GFW (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.

shocks• 13 years ago

Don't Baidu deliver more packages than Amazon? This is an interesting development…

yeukhon3• 13 years ago

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

firloop2• 13 years ago

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...

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

ekianjo• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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

firloop2• 13 years ago

"Total Received" is the amount that address has received ever. Even if they transferred the money to other wallets, the "Total Received" amount would not go down.

phaemon2• 13 years ago

Up to 0.16955721 BTC now, with 10 transactions.

Reddit getting 3% from Bitcoin actually sounds like quite a bit. I know there's a lot of stories about BTC, but I still think of it as a fairly obscure thing.

yeukhon3• 13 years ago

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.

devx2• 13 years ago

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

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• 13 years ago

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

anonymfus• 13 years ago

If you accept bitcoins, you could just sell them all immediately.

aqme28• 13 years ago

How are those last two things necessarily different from any volatile currency?

yeukhon3• 13 years ago

Because going from $150 to $100, or $100 to $150 is a $50 USD difference? Whereas USD to RMB is a few cents difference.

drcode5• 13 years ago

1) If you throw your wallet into a well, you won't be able to access that money, either.

2) People have been bartering for centuries and taxation of barter is already well defined by government. Bitcoin transactions get handled the exact same way.

3) You're witnessing the birth of a new currency, price fluctuation can't be avoided. However, bitcoin prices will stabilize over time. Plus, there's services that immediately convert you BTC into fiat currency to avoid this problem.

TomGullen2• 13 years ago

Here in the UK Bitcoins fall under "Capital Gains". That means no tax is due until you sell them for cash (IANAL but this my understanding). So price fluctuations don't matter, when you chose to sell you pay capital gains.

betterunix9• 13 years ago

"One is if you lose your key you won't be able to access your coins, right?"

Right but that is life. Make back ups when you have something critical like that.

"two, how is tax going work?"

The same way it works with anything else. The government will come in, assert that you own X in taxes on your Bitcoin income, and you will pay it or go to jail. You will probably need to pay with something other than Bitcoin, of course, which adds in transaction fees (but you just pass that cost on to your customers, right?).

"Third, bitcoin price goes up and down so rapidly"

By extension, your prices change daily. You'll probably charge a fixed fee in your local currency (Yuan?) and adjust your Bitcoin prices according to the market value.

kevcampb• 13 years ago

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

zhoutong• 13 years ago

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."

bernatfp• 13 years ago

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

jedunnigan6• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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).

frozenport• 13 years ago

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

wcoenen2• 13 years ago

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

ok_craig• 13 years ago

Or just a pump.

gwern2• 13 years ago

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

wcoenen2• 13 years ago

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. 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.

ffrryuu• 13 years ago

A step towards a de-Americanized world.

Baidu now accepts Bitcoin

Related Stories