One of the tools that I use to watch what’s happening in Bitcoinland is a site called fiatleak.com. It shows a graphical representation where in the world people are buying bitcoins, or actually what currency they are using to buy them. I let it run for a couple of hours tonight and it’s clear that China is the main buyer right now: out of the 27,000 BTC that were traded 24,000 were bought using Chinese Yuan!
Of course it’s daytime in China and a Sunday night in the US, but this is still a remarkable difference and it clearly shows which country is purchasing all the bitcoins. Now the question is whether it’s the government or local Chinese who are buying, I would not be surprised if it turns out to be both.
It seems to me that BTC China is trading at a bit higher than ‘western’ trading sites like Mt. Gox. Currently 639.75 EUR vs. 610.28 EUR, for example.
Correct Timen, BTC China always trades higher than the western sites. If you have a bank account in China and are willing to end up with RMB (or have a way to exchange them) you can do arbitrage and make money. Right now the difference is quite small, but last week BTC China quoted USD rates over $1100 (Mt. Gox peaked at $900).
Marc, true! and at least 20 of those btc were mine, coming from btc-e (highest spread)
a large part of btcchin is simply inter-exchange traffic. check out the bbs aswell