Thought some of you might want to know Chinese exchange markets' movements in this direction.
Holders like me have several choices to invest bitcoins now:
Huobi's BitVC (or YuBiBao in Chinese), OKCoins's BiShengBi, and ChinaBTC's JUA. All of them are from top exchange markets in China.
Personally I recommend ChinaBTC's JUA, at about 0.025% daily interest for current deposit, 1.3~1.4% monthly for fixed deposit (not available now).
URL http://save.jua.com/
In Chinese, JUA(聚阿) means collecting and saving treasures. Now it has more than 30k BTC savings in all.
You can click top corner flag to change the webpage language to English.
For other top exchange markets in China, there are also OKCoin's BiShengBi (Means more btc generated by your saved btc.) But currently it is not open to public.
And HuoBi's BitVC at about 0.013% daily interest for current deposit.
URL https://www.bitvc.com/
PS I don't work for ChinaBTC/Huobi/OKCoin, but I managed to get some btc income everyday last two months without staring at candle sticks charts, or enrolling in a signature campaign and count posts.
Actually the interest rate is not always constant, for example last week BitVC's rate is between 0.0126 and 0.0176.
As a BTC believer, the rise and drop of BTC price is not a big deal for me, as long as my BTC is keep increasing.
I now have income from both JUA and BitVC every day, JUA being easier to use and with higher pay back.
BitVC and JUA also have fixed deposit, with higher interest. But they are only available occasionally, and sold out very fast. The last time of BitVC's fixed deposit (VC finance) the interest rate is 1.2% monthly for 60days, JUA 1.3% monthly for 30days.
On the website I saw many investers IP (partially masked) are from outside China, including Australia, UK, US, Spain, Canada and Thailand. Many invested dozens of bitcoins in BitVC (with 50 btc max limit) and hundreds in JUA.
These markets' movement actually resembles Ma Yun's Alibaba Yu'e Bao, which went viral last year and raised $90 billion in just ten months.
Just to share some opportunities in China.
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This thread have so many views and replies, much more than pythonista's original post. This is beyond what I expected. So I guess I should finally update it...
[Edit 1]
Why do these websites offer interest while Bitcoin is not inflationary currency?
This is my opinion:
Apart from reasons posted by others, I think another sound one is that if the companies are big and have enough money to burn, they might just want to do this to gain more attraction and users. This is like what many B2C, SNS and IM service providers did when they were in early stages. You might once asked yourself, why are they selling at such a low price, not even covering manufacturing cost?
Loyal users are the most valuable asset to any website/company. When Internet started, the number of clicks is what every website craved for. It is still true now. More loyal users means more trust, reputation, traffic, and eventually more money.
Bitcoin in China is new. But the competition here is fierce.
An early and strong start means huge advantage. Just plain old Matthew Effect.
Take Jua.com for example. The company that owns Jua.com has ChBTC.com (ChinaBTC Exchange), BW.com (cloud mining) and 8R.com (P2P lending based on BTC mortgage) behind it. BTW, I think those domain names alone cost a fortune. JUA users are more likely to use these services over others just because of trust and convenience.
Consider Youtube's counterpart in China Youku.com, Twitter' s counterpart weibo.com, and Amazon's counterpart JD.com. These are already very big brands in China for years, and they are still burning VC money and struggle to seize users and the market. I don't think currently there remains much opportunity for new starters to build anything like Youku / Weibo / JD in China and succeed. Admittedly it is still possible, but it's extremely unlikely to happen.
Yes, giving away BTC as interest is a loss of money in the short term. But in the long run, it is hard to say.
If Bitcoin turns out to be a business of decades or even hundreds, this move of offering interest is a brilliant strategy to boost user number and gain reputation, as long as the company behind it is not just scam. This is the homework you should do. It's might be much cheaper than buying TV / Website commercials, or hiring more sales / promoting staff. Meanwhile, users get maximum profit from the company's offers, because in this way there's no middle man.
Additionally, more coins deposited means less coins dumped into exchanges and shorting leverage, which will contribute positively to btc price. Believers and HODLers will surely benefit from this.
So personally I think this way of gaining new users by offering interest is both understandable and justifiable.
[Edit 2]
Many have pointed out that the interest is too high to be true. I don't think that's ridiculously high.
You get 0.025% daily * 365 = 9.125% yearly. That's about 11 BTC generates 1 BTC/year.
For comparison, in China the typical interest of Internet P2P borrowing/lending is 8%~18% yearly.