In August 2012, a young Chinese entrepreneur posted on the online forum BitcoinTalk that he was selling shares in a company that would build hardware with chips dedicated to mining bitcoins and based on his earnings. Will pay dividends.

Jiang Xinyu, known as Friedcat on the forum, was one of the first in the world to promote such an idea through his company ASICMiner, which used the acronym for Application-Specific Integrated Circuits. Eventually, allegations of fraud arose when people alleged they didn’t receive their payments or supplies, and the company went bust.

The idea lived on, though, and the bitcoin mining business boomed in China, a country that produced the “factory of the world.” It was then that the idea of ​​bitcoin began to gain traction in China, as it became the dominant producer not only of mining equipment but of bitcoin itself thanks to the country’s cheap electricity.

“The idea of ​​decentralized money has never gained much traction in China,” said Leonhard Weiss, founder of the Hong Kong Bitcoin Association, who now leads technical content at Lightning Labs in Vancouver. work as “But the idea of ​​decentralized crowdfunding and startups in China was very attractive. I think people in China were more interested in gambling on future startups than what future money looked like.

The Chinese government has built a strict regulatory regime over the past decade to root out bitcoin trading and mining in the country, citing the digital currency as a threat to the country’s financial stability. Meanwhile, Trump ran on a crypto-friendly platform, attracting both the broader crypto industry and bitcoin true believers who see the digital asset as the future of money. On the campaign trail, Trump promised, among other things, to create a “strategic bitcoin reserve.”