CoinFox asked Dominik Weil, a co-founder of Bitcoin Vietnam, to comment on the ongoing bitcoin price surge. 

Dominik Weil: The main reason for the price continuously going up is that the price is going up - as banal and boring as it may sound. People see that the price is going up - so they're going long on Bitcoin as well in order to participate on that trend. Markets in general move in cycles - and for any new trend to evolve, the majority of the market participants will need to be on the wrong side of the trade for making a change in trend happening.

Otherwise one can surely say, that the majority of the buying pressure is coming - like in late 2013 - from China. It seems to be mostly a speculative bubble - enhanced by the current loose monetary policy of the PBOC. I agree with the major Chinese exchanges when they say, that circumventing Capital Controls does not play a major role in this surge - since when it would be just about getting money out of the country, we would face heavy selling pressure on the exchanges outside China. There is a lot of more common, easier (also in the sense of: Not necessary to get your head around this weird thing that Bitcoin still is for the average person) and traditional ways to circumvent Capital Controls available - so I agree, that its not a primary use case of Bitcoin in China right now.

While the acceptance of direct bank deposits at BTCChina is certainly positive news - I seriously doubt, that this has any major effect on the current price development; given that competitors of BTCChina had re-enabled direct bank deposits already quite a while ago. When people now claim, that China has "unbanned" Bitcoin - thats the same nonsense, like the claim that China "banned" Bitcoin which we heard around 1,5 years ago on a nearly weekly basis. It may make nice headlines and people in the West have sth. to talk about - but it does not necessarily match the reality on the ground.

Alexey Tereshchenko