The Rise Of The Dragon
Centuries ago, Napoleon Bonaparte was quoted as saying: “Let China sleep, for when she wakes she will tremble the world”
It was certainly no short-term prediction as it has only been in the last forty years that this prophecy appears to be coming true, and at a great rate. In those four decades China has progressed from a nation having a poverty rate of over eighty percent to only around ten percent now. That, incidentally involves a staggering figure of around 700 million people. Some might say this is a major upgrade to the previous second “leap forward” instigated by Chairman Mao in the late nineteen fifties. This was an extreme attempt to change the nation from a farming country to that of an industrialised one.
From a country that was called rather dismissively, as the factory of the world, which alluded to its cheap labour and goods, China now leads the world in many aspects, not the least, education standards, road and rail infrastructure. One statistic quotes youth literacy as close to 100%. It may surprise some, that they now have more super computers than any country. While China is still second to GDP to the USA, if the Purchasing Power Parity metric is used, it is higher than any other country in the world already. By any kind of calculation, experts predict that the GDP of China will exceed that of the United States by about 2030.
How is this economics mini-lesson relevant to cryptocurrency and blockchain you might ask? Let us focus more then on the technology sector where the names Jack Ma, Pony Ma and Robin Li may be familiar to some. They are some of the richest people in China and are founders of the so-called “BAT” companies. This is of course, an acronym for Baidu, Alibaband TenCent, a trio that are the biggest software companies in the nation. In fact Tencent and Alibaba are now in the top ten companies in the entire world. Alibaba an e-commerce giant, is seen by many to be closing in fast on the previously dominant Amazon. TenCent is now the world’s largest gaming company.
The “poorest” of these three, search engine Baidu is outside this group but is still worth over 60 billion dollars. They incidentally, were the company that pushed Google aside to claim something like eighty percent of search traffic in China to a relatively measly ten per cent by Google. This is mainly due to tough regulations by the government, who repeatedly put the interests of it’s own population above that of any multinational non-Chinese entity.
This attitude by the government is widely known with its strict stance on regulating cryptocurrency exchanges and ICO's
Enter Changpeng Zhao, CEO of Binance, now the biggest exchange, having achieved that feat in less than a year. They are compliant with Chinese regulators and it is said their servers are in Korea and they have an office in Tokyo. We all know of course, how advanced Japan is in cryptocurrency adoption.
To finish this article we of course must mention, last but not least, Da Hong Fei, the Chinese answer to Vitalik Buterin and CEO of their own Ethereum-like technology, NEO. There are countless references to this technology, but many see it has the potential to exceed the market cap of Ethereum as it has the advantage of being easier for programmers to work with. Although cloned from Ethereum initially, common programming languages can be applied with NEO unlike Ethereum. Couple that with their strategy of building an ecosytem before the market expanded. This is somewhat the reverse of Ethereum where Buterin has nowhere the control of his blockchain as Da has. He also has support from the Chinese government, being an advisor to the recent regulatory changes to the crypto environment in China.
It must be plain to see now that everything favors China when you observe the massive pool of talent and financial capability that they offer this environment. You may then also deduce that the Chinese government is anything but anti-crypto with their hard stance as they genuinely appear to be placing the interests of its population before anything else. We recall cryptocurrency educator Andreas Antonopoulos quoting some time ago that most Altcoins are scams. He said this of course well before the market had the 1500 or so coins as it has today, but the point has some relevance as we know with Bitconnect and others.
Napoleon’s Nostradamus-like prediction seems to be rapidly becoming a reality.
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