A recent survey conducted by Chinese blockchain news site PANews made some interesting conclusions. Namely, overall 63% of 4,200 people surveyed think cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin are unnecessary as a payment system. However, 40% would consider investing in cryptos.
About 14% of the people surveyed had invested in cryptocurrencies already. The majority of the people who were interested or invested were born after 1990.
Younger Millennials Know Crypto Best in China
The survey broke the 4,200 valid questionnaires down by age group discovered that the majority of those who are invested in cryptocurrency in China’s investment community were born in the 1990s. Of the 372 people who indicated that they understood blockchain well, the majority were born after 1995, while the second-place group was born after 1990.
Between the post-1990 and post-1995 group, they are almost double the group born after 1980 but before 1990, whose number was only 178 of people invested.
Only 75 of the people surveyed had never heard of blockchain or Bitcoin at all, meaning an astounding 98.22% of people were aware of cryptocurrencies. The majority of people indicated that they did not understand it very well.
Out of the people overall surveyed, 40% indicated that they would like to invest in cryptocurrency. While it is currently legal to possess cryptocurrency in China, the legality of buying and selling it has been questionable for years. The ICO crackdown of 2017 in which ICOs were banned and several crypto exchanges were shut down pretty much spelled the end of the open crypto markets in China.
Still, Chinese interest in cryptos remains high and there are plenty of exchanges through which Chinese can still access crypto markets. The Great Firewall has never actually stopped anyone in China from accessing the rest of the world’s cyber resources, only made it difficult.
Also read: Bitcoin in 2019: Analysts See Institutional Investors Wading into Crypto
Around 20% of Chinese Investors Only Know Bitcoin
One finding that stands out is that out of the 598 people who indicated they had invested in cryptocurrencies, 17 said they didn’t know about them. 103 said they only know about Bitcoin.
The 8BTC article which fleshes out the PANews findings best opines that crypto as a payment rail may not be the best route forward:
As everyone knows, Nakamoto has defined it as a peer-to-peer electronic cash payment system in the Bitcoin white paper. “Payment” is regarded as the original intention of cryptocurrency, but in China where mobile payment is very convenient, up to 63.43% of the choices ignore encryption. Money as a means of payment suggests that the road to promoting cryptocurrency in China may not work.
Of the people surveyed, the majority who are invested came in during the bull run and subsequent decline of 2017. Most of the people who’ve invested in this category have less than 10,000 yuan or $1500 in the market.
Featured image from Shutterstock.
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