The majority of Bitcoin exchanges happen in China's currency, the yuan, but no one's quite sure why.

One theory is that people see it as a way to evade the country's rules restricting money flowing out of the country. But it may be simpler than that — Bitcoin might be popular in China simply because everyone's talking about it.

Jerry Brito, a scholar at the Mercatus Institute, said that it might have started with a CCTV documentary on Bitcoin that aired all over the country. In the U.S., this is a common pattern: The media reports on Bitcoin, either its usefulness in black-market transactions or its skyrocketing price, people become more interested in it, buy some, the price goes up. Rinse and repeat.

Bitcoin fever is China is so strong, there's even a magazine called BTCMAN. And Chinese social media, especially the Twitter-like service Weibo, is positively lousy with everyone's opinion on the digital cryptocurrency.