China’s largest search engine Baidu - also known as the “Google of China” – has become the first service of its kind to accept the crypto-currency Bitcoin.
Baidu said on Tuesday that its security division Jiasule began
supporting the virtual currency on October 14.
"Jiasule, as the innovator of the internet, has become the
first cloud services vendor to support bitcoin, giving us richer
payment methods and experience," the company said in a
statement.
Jiasule is an anti-DDoS (distributed denial of service) and
firewall security product that is aimed at protecting websites
from malicious attacks that attempt to crash them by overloading
the site.
However, the adoption of Bitcoin is not across the entire
company. Instead, it is only for the protection service, which
can be compared to CloudFlare in the United States.
Baidi is the fifth most visited website in the world, according
to data from Alexa Traffic Rank – a subsidiary of
Amazon.com. The site has a market cap of over US$53 billion and
is probably the largest one to accept the crypto-currency.
Following the scandal around the Silk Road website - dubbed
the “Amazon.com of illegal drugs” - where the virtual
online currency was used by website customers to buy and sell
illicit goods and services, the currency has made an impressive
stride towards going mainstream.
Bitcoin has basically made up its value after it dropped in the
wake of Silk Road's seizure. On Wednesday, the virtual currency
stood at around US$155 according to Mt.Gox (USD) on Bitcoin charts.
Bitcoin is the first implementation of the crypto-currency
concept which uses peer-to-peer technology to operate with no
central authority or banks. The managing of transactions and the
issuing of Bitcoin is carried out collectively by a consensus
network.