Thimbron

I've been monitoring, on and off, the Chinese Bitcoin news feed¹ I found a few weeks ago.  Thus far it appears mostly to consist of news originating in the West.  I suppose it is interesting to see what is of note to a Chinese audience, but this is disappointing none the less.

The only story originating in China on the front page today concerns some sort of scam being busted by provincial police in An Hui, with notes about the scammers attempting to flee to the Philippines.

1. If you can call it that.  The Bitcoin specific feed appears only to be available on my iPad, and of course doesn't support Atom/RSS.  It's at http://8btc.com/flash, for reference, if you happen to have an iPad or iPhone. [↩]

I'm attempting to survey the Chinese Bitcoin scene.  I really don't even know where to start.  There are various "news" type sites that claim to convey news about what's happening in "crypto" in China/Asia in English, such as these:

http://www.chinacryptonews.com

https://www.asiacryptotoday.com/

http://www.coinnewsasia.com/

They are utter garbage¹.  For an example of a news site that is not garbage, see qntra.net.

Another category is Chinese language news sites, such as chainnews.com.  Riddled with shitcoinery, obviously.

Then there are forum type sites.  There is for example the chinese language version of the mostly defunct Bitcointalk forum.  This is interesting in that it is dedicated mostly to Bitcoin.  It is not so interesting in that there's not much going on, going by the number and timestamps of posts.  It is even less interesting in that according to this site, at least, it is not reachable from within China.  I don't recall how I found it, but there is also this Chinese crypto forum, which does appear to be visible inside China.  From the name alone, it is obvious that this site is ridden through and through with shitcoinery.

Now although these sites are all garbage, maybe there's something good in there.  Maybe there's a post here or there by someone who has a clue.  But how would I know, not being fluent in Chinese?  I have made some inroads towards solving this problem.  At the moment I have a rather tenuous² connection with a translator inside China.  I was able to have her do translation of a sample from this piece about China's purported new state sponsored crypto scam, and her work seems to be better than Google Translate, at least.

I don't want to say where I'm going next with this because I have no idea.  At this point I do think I have made some progress, though.

1. Garbage in the sense that their content is not guided by any discernible principles, and therefore ethics [↩]
2. I found her via a Chinese masseuse who I'm having an affair with but who I'd like to dump, which is complicated [↩]