South Korea justice ministry prepares to ban cryptocurrency trading | Hacker News Reader

South Korea justice ministry prepares to ban cryptocurrency trading

reuters.com

206 pointsdlau1137 comments

When I first learned about crypto currency on HN back in 2012 I was excited. It sounded like a fun technical project that could do good in the world. I bought some along the way, followed projects. Along the way it changed. Yesterday I saw a spam post on Reddit about joining a "pump and dump group", which I had to research. It's groups of people who coordinate a buy of a specific currency, spread false news about this currency to create a mania, drive up the price, sell it at a profit. Not only is this probably illegal, it's immoral. Maybe this is how people who were in the internet in 1992 felt in 2000?

Pump and dump schemes, among others, are a good example of why unregulated does not necessarily mean good.

Agreed, I think that's my favorite lesson from the crypto experiment. Sure there are people who use regulation as a gatekeeping function, or as a way to magnify their power, but regulations really do exist for the good of the people.

It’s a bit like finding a piece of code that does something crazy.

If you ask around, there could be a really good reason for it.

I don’t think we’re going to have a usable crypto currency until economists get involved, or we simply relearn all the lessons we’ve learnt to date.

Yes, crypto is not complete until there are synthetic CDOs!

Now we at least have futures market, which is a progress.

CDOs are in the research phase currently: https://ethresear.ch/t/collateralized-debt-obligations-for-i...

You can do CDOs in Ethereum today if you want.

I guess. I mean the regulated stock market has dark pools and super fast algorithms jumping in front of people's trades stealing from them.

I actually feel like the playing field is more uneven between individuals and firms in the regulated stock market vs the btc exchanges.

I also think the bitcoin exchanges are backroom dealing and insider trading, but I feel like they are less sophisticated vs the "legal" theft that is taking place on wall street.

I mean bitcoin exchanges are certainly the wild west, but I honestly don't care if people want to run pump and dumps on unsophisticated investors. That is something you can pretty easily defend against by doing your own research. There are far more nefarious things going on on both bitcoin exchanges and the real stock market.

> I actually feel like the playing field is more uneven between individuals and firms in the regulated stock market vs the btc exchanges.

This is definitely true. I first got into bitcoin as a way to do algotrading on an exchange without having to navigate whatever processes are required in order to be allowed to do so in "real" markets.

I agree. People who chase whatever is going up deserve to lose their shirt at least once.

"Hedge fund schemes, among others, are a good example of why regulated does not necessarily mean good."

One extreme negative, or extreme positive, derivative of a view does not condemn nor justify it. You need to consider the merits as a whole, not with piecemeal bias confirmation or condemnation.

Keeping track of crypto amidst all the hype recently, it's abundantly clear to me that the recent explosion of speculation based trading is a signifier that cryptocurrency is a bubble just waiting to burst.

I don't think this is bad in any right. It looks (and I grew up in the bay area through turn of the century) just like the dot com bubble. The promising part of this is that the underlying technologies being developed, a way to distribute information and business logic in a way where there is an indisputable fully traceable truth, is huge. I think of blockchain-like platforms like Ethereum as the ARPANET to our internet. The opportunities to supplant existing fully centralized systems such as stock exchanges, escrow systems, supply chain/provenance tracking, etc. with a fully decentralized or hybrid approach is huge.

In the end though, I think it will come down to where governments draw the line in the sand. The sad but true reality is that the regulators with the guns will always have ultimate power.

The interesting thing is to cash out now- and invest into the amazon of cryptocurrency, when all is going down.

If anybody knew what the Amazon of cryptocurrency is, we'd all be investing into it.

For all we know that crypto is here, it just hasn't been evenly distributed yet.

I’m pretty sure that’s what Ripple is trying to position themselves as. Whether they pull it off, who knows.

Every crypto is trying to position themselves as the survivor (by way of real world 'utility') for when the bubble bursts. They all want to be Amazon, rising from the ashes of a crashed market.

Ripple's underdog challenger, Stellar XLM, is trying to claim the same mantle. So are thousands of other 'utility coins', of course, including ETH, XRB, VEN, ICX, and even the "privacy" coins, like Monero.

The fact is this is uncharted territory. We don't know for sure whether we're at the leading or trailing edge of a bubble, and we don't know for sure that any, some, or most crypto will still be around in 5-10 years.

Interesting times!

How did it change? People have been scamming with bitcoins forever. Mt. Gox was a scam exchange. There were a bunch of people scamming even before that.

I see it as different. Mt Gox was a legitimate business, with honest employees who were poor at implementing security. Someone saw an opportunity and stole. That exists even with regulation. My issue is with the rise of people who's intent from the beginning is to decieve. Similar to the scam coins that will never deliver a working product.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=100514.0

Look at all these btc ponzi schemes from 2012

Also I thought Mt Gox had a bot buying tons of btc on their own exchange pumping the price.

Oh wow, I didn't know the scamming went back that far. On the other hand... With Ponzi schemes, isn't it obvious from the start what they are? Maybe I give humanity too much credit.

I think the what a lot of people don't realize about ponzi schemes or pyramid schemes, or scams in general, is they don't rely purely or necessarily on fooling the 'victim'. Very often greed is enough of a motivator.

I've experienced at least one really big country-spanning pyramid scheme where lots of people participated, completely aware that it was a pyramid scheme. They just figured they'd be able to 'get out' before the thing would collapse. Obviously that often didn't work out...

Often they're started by people who have... not exactly honest intentions, but more people who believe their own hype than outright fraudsters. See the opening paragraphs of https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-12-17/martin-sh...

Not always; I can imagine with MtGox they slowly became one, after becoming insolvent and figuring out they could pay their customers by getting more money in.

Mt Gox was insolvent long before it officially was. Mark tried to trade using money that didn't exist in order to bring it into the black, but he never managed. Look up wizsec's analysis.

Here's a summary that patio11 wrote on wizsec's analysis.

https://gist.github.com/patio11/598ec35c6c1675c97d93383f41b3...

On the bright side, the idiots who join these groups hoping to scam others tend to lose their shirts as well. The person orchestrating the pump-and-dump scheme bought the currency at $X per coin in question long before, and he's using the people in the group as patsies. "Buy the coins at $X + $Y, and the rise in price will make it so that you can sell the coins to some other idiot for $Y + $Z!"

If there aren't enough "outsider" idiots to buy the coins for $Y + $Z before the correction happens, the "insider" idiots lose their shirts. The original person, of course, makes a tidy profit.

---

I learned this the hard way playing Runescape as a 16-year-old. 2007 was an interesting time for that game.

>I learned this the hard way playing Runescape as a 16-year-old. 2007 was an interesting time for that game.

Playing that game over the years was the most thorough education in trusting strangers on the internet anyone could ever need

For me, it was an introduction to basic finance topics like abitrage and trading; also the enormous scope of scams people can pull.

I made my fortune in high frequency trading of rune sets after they introduced Grand Exchange and steel smelting prior to it.

I was one of those assholes that ran a bot farm to devalue your labour. RS was a great place to learn about the race to the bottom, economies of scale, and other random economic topics as well.

The most interesting part of RS was that the more raw the product, the more it was worth - you could get more XP out of it.

And before the Grand Exchange, buying in bulk cost more than buying small amounts, because buying large amounts of materials required you to sit on World 1 spamming "buying iron ore whatever each" for hours.

I'm not sure the historical data still exists but would this be around the time of organised market manipulation? The spiking gold rings 500% then dumping just before you told everyone else to springs to mind.

Yeah, it was when the Grand Exchange locked in market rates - you couldn't trade at any price outside 10% of the established price.

At the same time, ClanChat was introduced, allowing enormous groups of strangers to coordinate their activities.

They usually accumulate old cryptos or whole-buy them at ridiculously low prices (almost 0). So their biggest expense is actually marketing.

The vast majority of crypto will ultimately collapse, just like the vast majority of dot coms failed and crashed the entire market.

But... those that survived with solid fundamentals have often gone on to thrive spectacularly -- e.g. Google, Amazon.

I can see something similar ultimately happening in the crypto space.

Yeah, heard this 100 times already. But why does it have to be like the dot com? What if it just stays a niche market for 50 years? What you say implies that crypto is as full of potential as the internet was to make it possible for businesses to grow as big as Google, Amazon. Not mentioning of course a lot of other factors that made Google, Amazon big like political influence, globalisation, lack of competition/regulation in certain areas etc.

Not trying to be pessimistic but genuinely curious why so many people make the analogy to the dot com period.

> Not trying to be pessimistic but genuinely curious why so many people make the analogy to the dot com period.

Because most people are not creative nor critical thinkers and the extent of their brilliance is superficial pattern matching. To most people the dot-com bubble seems to fit all the patterns so by their logic it must have the same outcome. If you think critically about the differences of the crypto craze and the dot-com era, you’ll see how irrational it is to make a strong comparison.

Bitcoin is not Pets.com. Bitcoin is Google.

I don’t think Bitcoin is Google, with the limit of 7 transactions per second, it just can’t scale enough to be the Google of currencies.

Do you think the only thing that makes cryptocurrencies valuable is transaction rate?

> Bitcoin is Google.

I'd say it's probably AltaVista or Yahoo!...

It's hard to say 'Bitcoin is x'.

Perhaps the Bitcoin/Cryptocurrency situation is a close repeat of the dot-com boom/bust/rebirth.

Perhaps it's a close repeat of Tulip Mania.

Or perhaps it's a new category, and the rise of the next technology a decade from now will be a callback to what happened with Bitcoin.

This'll all seem obvious in a year or three. For now, we speculate and wait.

Or there may not be any long term winners in this arena as people realise just how bad most if this stuff is for actual transactions and consumer protection.

> superficial pattern matching.

> Bitcoin is Google.

Is this satire?

Google provides a valuable service that saves me time.

Bitcoin, uhh...

If you can’t see how Bitcoin provides millions of others a valuable service, you have a poor imagination.

Please do explain this service! Because as far as I can tell it's got no real utility outside of speculation.

How about the ability to move large sums of money around the world without having to trust or be limited by any government or bank?

Not really that useful to many millions of people IMHO.

Millions, yes it is... the world is a lot bigger place than you think it is.

Sorry, I don't believe being able to transfer large amounts of money around without having to trust or be limited by banks or governments is much concern to 'millions'.

There really aren't all that many people that have problems with that, who are that distrustful of existing infrastructure.

There are millions of millionaires in China alone that are very concerned about the future security and mobility of their money. Now consider India, Russia, Iran. This isn’t fiction.

This has been thrown around for years on the BTC scene, and it's just not a killer app. Nor do I believe that such people are willing to use cryptocurrencies for such transfers, in their millions.

And that's before we get on to whether it is moral to facilitate such anyway...

Looking at the market cap, it's about half Google. Probably much larger (2x) by and of year according to Tom Lee.

You’re right. I meant, if anything Bitcoin is Google, but it’s not even that.

I would liken it to Apple myself. First mover advantage does count for quite a bit in software.

> What if it just stays a niche market for 50 years?

That would still be a collapse, just a silent one. Niche market means that everybody has on some subconscious level accepted that a large stack cannot be liquidated and plays along by "hodling" so that they can continue feeling rich. This is what is eventually happening to most collector's items: trading volume drops faster than the price and before you know it, there isn't enough trading going on to regularly call out an updated market price. The last occasional buyers will happily buy at close to the price from the last time there was an active market, but potential sellers are not even trying to sell in bulk, knowing how little money they could expect. It's less frustrating to just forget about it than selling for a dime.

Did you just "coin" HODL as a verb, hodling? Because I gotta say I have not read that usage before. Hodling is my new word of the day.

"HODL" originated from a drunken rant on Bitcointalk during the 2013-14 bubble and MtGox exchange collapse.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=375643.0

And it's such a fascinating term! Holding is what Warren Buffett does, after having applied his unique evaluation skills before buying, hodling is what a True Believer does. "If you are not a True Believer and cash out early, you are not deserving of eventually entering the paradise of a bitcoin bet retirement."

And to people who self-identify with the term, I think it might also be a kind of rhetorical last line of defense for when someone criticises their trust and belief: "those may be fine arguments or not, see I don't care, I HODL which means I just don't take it as serious as you. Mind your own business and let me dream my dream". Could also be motivated as a psychological hedge for the day after, "sure, it was expensive, but look at fun we had!"

As a self-identified HODLer - I like to think it's because holding isn't nearly as easy as it sounds. Ignoring what 'Mr Market' is offering you for your property on any given day and overruling your herd-following instincts is not easy, else Warren Buffet wouldn't be such an outlier.

And yes, the HODL mantra is a way of reminding myself that I shouldn't make emotional decisions in the heat of the moment.

The dot-com period was just the latest example of what happens when a new technology is widely adopted. Automobiles famously went through a similar period early last century. Many new entrants crowd into the field, there's a free-for-all as everyone tries to make the killer app, then through a weird alchemy of vision, execution, and luck a few brands eventually buy up or force into bankruptcy enough competitors to dominate the field. In recent history at least, explosion and consolidation of new players is the norm when a new technology is introduced.

As to your second question - which I would rephrase as 'why would this technology be widely adopted?' I would say, if the role of a trusted third party can be automated, it will be because nature abhors inefficiency. And trusted third parties aren't a niche field - not just banks but also a large part of any civil service can now replace humans with algorithms. That's a lot of disruption.

Pump and dumps as well as these groups were definitely around in 2012. I agree that cryptocurrencies have drastically changed (IMO for the worse) but pump and dumps on shitcoins are nothing new.

I'd argue that there is no Bitcoin community to speak of anymore (just like there isn't an "internet community"). The technology evolved a bit but it is still essentially the same.

See https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/

https://bitcointalk.org/ is pretty major. There's also a large chinese crypto website the name of which temporarily escapes me.

> Not only is this probably illegal

Definitely illegal.

do you have any insight for how this is illegal considering that cryptocurrencies are currently unregulated.

Lack of regulations doesn't matter, they could be still charged under generic fraud & deception laws, it is just harder. It was the same with MLM - new laws or explicit bans were introduced as it was too hard to prosecute with existing legal framework.

Because I can no longer edit this post, I just wanted to say that I tried doing research and I'm less sure than I was initially. But I will add that just because the SEC currently does very little regulation of crypto, that doesn't mean that federal laws don't apply to it. It just means you're more likely to get away with it and there's more uncertainty about what's allowed and how crypto is thought of legally.

> Not only is this probably illegal, it's immoral.

But it's decentralized~. Bitcoin was initially hyped by "crypto-anarchists", to be free of government regulation, transfer costs, etc - well that's what you get. Something something cake and eating.

The only cryptocurrencies that will prevail within the next five years are the regulated ones. The rest will be used for shady purposes like tax evasion and paying for ransomware, and they'll get hit hard regularly by hacked or dodgy exchanges. I'm fairly sure the current crypto exchanges operate as a ponzi scheme right now, they won't be able to convert back to fiat with enough volume.

The interesting thing to consider about bitcoins is its value isn't all hype, The cost of electricity use to produce them adds a value to it. Strengthens that emotional bond for the owners. Provides a feedback loop for users etc.

It's just sad this tech will end up being used mostly for black money.

> The cost of electricity use to produce them adds a value to it.

That's not true. What makes you think so?

You should reach Satoshi' s whitepaper to understand that.

Can you provide a summary of Satoshi’s argument here? I’m failing to see how the usage of electricity, which is an entropy-losing process, leads to added value through bitcoin

I think I understand Bitcoin well enough to detect that you don't know what you're talking about.

One could argue that a higher current difficulty increases trust in very recent transactions, thereby raising the unitility of Bitcoin as a medium of exchange (ha!) and thus affecting the price.

But that effect is small and we're talking about the difficulty during the last 10 blocks, at most.

Anything before that is for the past.

>The cost of electricity use to produce them adds a value to it.

This is a sunk-cost, not added value.

You should reach Satoshi' s whitepaper.

I have, please elaborate.

We got our first 0.01 bitcoin in 2011. Libertarian conference, wife gave her email, got crypto. I literally was stealing Gary Johnson's nametag during this time.

Bought my first whole bitcoin in 2015.

Until the end of last year, I had a good feeling about crypto.

The alt-coin madness has me scared for family and friends. They arent listening when I tell them Bitcoin and diversify. They go all-in on pump and dump new coins like TRON and IOTA.

Im actually scared.

I see it too, I even have family asking for spare accounts on exchanges! All exchanges are overloaded, not allowing for new accounts, it's crazy.. I just keep telling them: treat it like a casino, don't put money in you can't live without, say goodbye to your money at day 1.

That said, IOTA is actually pretty interesting from a technical standpoint, you should read about the Tangle ;)

IOTA would be fine, but how many other coins have 0 transaction fees now?

While I dont own any Raiblocks, they are using like 7 severs to confirm. Supposedly fixes all fee/speed problems.

I worry most about the ownership of non-mined coins. The founders nearly always pre-mine or grant themselves significant amounts of coins. The faucet that is crypto mining is all based on work/energy.

I don't understand how this is immoral. Everybody knows that everybody is just in it because they hope someone else will come along later and pay more for a coin than they did. Who cares about pump and dump and pyramid schemes? Someone dumb enough to put money she/he can't miss into the system is probably also dumb enough to put said money into a gambling machine or any other scheme (prince from Sudan?). Meanwhile people have fun and true innovations may come out (the crypto of monero/zcash combined with the master-node structure of DASH or a Tangle based system like IOTA). Why all the emotion? Literally everywhere on the internet and classic media people say: Don't do it, it's a bubble. If people can't listen, they need to feel, if you don't allow people to feel they become unhappy anyway, they may even be driven to TOR based decentralized exchanges where they are even more likely to get schemed.

"In an official announcement, South Korean government reaffirms there will be NO TRADING BAN"

https://twitter.com/iamjosephyoung/status/951428854085689344

Multiple tweets stating this is all FUD. Can someone contradict or corroborate this claim? Lots of

"I talked to my contact in South Korea who works for a major exchange, don't fall into the FUD. The ban is ONLY applicable to exchanges that are not following the previous KYC regulations."

When you were talking did you hear a constant smashing sound of a sell button or screams in the background?

Anyways, people who invested in a single bitcoin yesterday only lost $1000 overnight.

"Justice minister Park Sang-ki said the government is preparing a bill to ban trading of the virtual currency on domestic exchanges."

That's what Reuters is saying right now.

That should trump any tweets you are reading about this being FUD or a market manipulation by the mystical bearwhale.

Reuters is fairly accurate and unbiased imho.

They're preparing a bill. Doens't mean their bill will pass. The ruling party is currently a minority in the national assembly.

Fake news mainstream media strikes again:

https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/7plk7q/dont...

Maybe Google/FB ought to ban CNBC?

Wow, high denial in the crypto world. Textbook reaction of investors who refuse to face the real world.

Those tweets are the ones that are FUD.

https://youtu.be/nK-Lid5wO-Y

The ban will come. In this video, the commentator goes into detail what the South Korea government plans to do and what the government thinks about it. They see cryptocurrency as the second coming of "Bada Iyagi", which was a gambling game that got banned a couple of years ago [1].

[1] http://world.kbs.co.kr/english/archive/program/news_zoom.htm...

Quick question since I dont understand SK politics.

Could the peasant class that made money off BTC unite and Lobby/bribe/influence SK politicians?

Also, do American's have a plan if there is a ban?

http://www.kookje.co.kr/news2011/asp/newsbody.asp?code=0200&...

Basically the ministry of Justice announced they are working on banning exchanges between crypto and fiat currency in Korea, and they ultimately aim to close down all exchanges.

Few hours later, ministry of Strategy and Finance calls out that the ministry of Justice is announcing as if their words are final, but not all government bodies have agreed to that yet.

For reference, ministry of Strategy and Finance is one of the most powerful government body in Korea (they fund the ministries). After this news cryptocurrency value is starting to shoot up again in Korea after the crash.

From Reddit (r/cryptocurrency) - a friend messaged me this today:

   I'm a South Korean citizen. Let me just tell you what 
   just happened. About 4 hours ago, Ministry of Justice
   issued a statement that the SK government is seeking 
   to ban all crypto exchanges. They explicitly stated 
   that this was a decision that was well communicated 
   between various branches of the government. This 
   caused the market to crash, and really caused a media
   firestorm among Koreans. 

   And then 2 hours ago, the Ministry of Finance and the 
   Blue House issued a statement that this decision to 
   ban all exchanges wasn't something that was 
   unilaterally agreed upon, and that the statement made 
   by the MoJ was not their stance on this matter. Now 
   here is my speculation on what happened. 

   There was a unilateral agreement to shut all exchanges, 
   but as you all would know, this is a very anti-democratic
   and anti-capitalistic thing to do. So they decided to send 
   out a trial balloon. 

   When the statement was made it caused an outrage, as 
   there are approximately 2 million crypto investors 
   in SK. National elections are held on April, so to 
   control the damage I think the Blue House changed 
   its mind and decided to throw the MoJ under the bus. 
   A lot of Koreans are speculating that this is what
   happened under the hood, which is very amateurish. I 
   just feel bad for all the guys who cut losses today.

Also, some of those politicians could be traders too and mixing the presage for profit ;)

Is bitcoin even usable to buy things online anymore?

The transaction fees are so high that it seems useless for anything but speculation at this stage.

Seems to me that it completely lost its original purpouse if that doesn't get ajusted somehow.

Say 1% of transaction value with a maximum of the current transaction fee maybe.

how is this comment relavant? Bitcoin is only one of the cryptocurrencies traded on exchanges.

It's the only crypto currency some sites take as payment instead of card.

Correct me if I'm wrong but i have't seen any sites taking anything else so as far as I'm aware all the other crypto currencies have only ever been used for speculation.

And i believe how a currency is used is quite relevant if you ask me.

There are a few websites that accept other tokens but they're few and far between, nothing like bitcoin.

This is for monero: https://www.projectcoralreef.com/all-stores/

Nothing huge, but something.

What do you mean? Even if you're talking about Korean exchanges only, they trade a dozen different cryptocurrencies - Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, EOS, QTUM, Monero, ZCash, Litecoin, etc. Example:

https://m.bithumb.com/wallet/P102

That's exactly what i said "only one of" not "the only".

Crazy how fast the markets moved on this news. The price crashed and bounced halfway back before I even found the article, and I was actively searching for the source of the panic.

But, perhaps that's because in the grand scheme, SK is small news and other traders who got there first knew full well that it'd rebound.

I'm not sure SK is that small news in crypto? Don't they make up a huge percentage of volume?

China made up a much larger portion of the volume, and the market rebounded and even soared after their ban(s).

Their volume figures are pumped by some exchanges allowing larger traders to pay a flat-rate monthly fee rather than a percentage on trades, and are sometimes so large that it's hard to treat them as credible.

My crypto group chat let me know there was going to be Ripple news today.

Bought under 2$, already at $2.25.

This is the bull run market I hate, but I'm also well connected...

The exchanges got raided for tax evasion, I think we need to see the bill first before saying that crypto trading will be banned.

Banning the exchange of digital assets, in my opinion, is like banning the internet. It's not feasible in the long run. Would also be a disappointing move to see coming from a democratic country that has some degree of property rights.

It's more like banning a specific set of companies from opening legal websites in Korea. It's entirely doable, and has been done many times (e.g., porn). I won't comment on its morality: case by case, I guess.

The ban's purpose is not to stop the most determined, persistent crypto-anarchists from realizing their dream. Its purpose is to scare away your average retired dads and office workers from pouring their life savings into BTC, because otherwise the country will have to feed their children when the bubble pops.

(Unlike crypto-anarchists, most Korean people and the government believe that it's the country's duty to keep children well fed and educated, even if their parents are raging idiots. Whether we actually follow through is... debatable, I guess.)

Right after the S.Korean Justice Ministry announced this, the Finance Ministry is like WTF? we were planning on taxing them. We can tax them if you get rid of it.

So far this plan doesn't have the full government support so it might not actually happen.

It's a tough task to let the air of a balloon slowly.

On one hand SK probably has to do something because so many people are jumping on and eventually will likely get burned. On the other, they just removed a bunch of "money" from the hands of their citizenry by tanking the markets. Which in and of itself may be world wide good deed as it could dampen dangerous rampant speculation but it does make less "rich" people.

My guess is the decline continues into spring but picks back up come summer and into next year (although at a slower rate which isn't a bad thing). BTC isn't going anywhere any time soon and although the whole thing is overheated right now I believe more gains are likely in store in coming years. Shaking the weak hands out stabilizes a market and a stable market is what is missing at the moment.

So I'm assuming SK doesn't want their citizens' money 1) exposed to the risk of a bubble 2) for which SK society will blame them 3) flowing through Chinese and Russian miners to 4) pad North Korean state finances?

This is a money grab isn't it the South Korean goverment sees a lot of money moving about in crypto currency and they want to 'tax' it because why not?

The entire article sounded like excuses to me for why they need to be 'monitored' and of course if they are monitoring the might as well tax it right?

Baning it is no going to solve much so it sound more like a threat to me to make the exchanges more cooperative.

Bitcoin sank on Monday after website CoinMarketCap removed prices from South Korean exchanges, because coins were trading at a premium of about 30 percent in Asia’s fourth largest economy. That created confusion and triggered a broad selloff among investors.

So counterparty risks is still something which is misunderstood in the cryptocurrency space?

With action pending against South Korea exchanges, higher prices were warranted.

Are other states planning to follow the example of Korea? I would have expected that governments would not take it lightly that some entity is challenging the states monopoly to control the flow of value by means of emitting currency.

(sorry, now i am more informed, China is imposing similar bans; also South Korea wants more synchronisation with Japan and China on these issues: https://cryptovest.com/news/south-korea-pushing-deeper-colla... )

This was only a matter of time. Next up, IRS and US crackdown.

My prediction is that Coinbase will be raided by FBI/SEC for one reason or another in 2018. Leading reason IMO is a manufactured or actual link to terrorism financing they will use as pretext. Never ever keep coins in an exchange wallet.

Stop spamming this prediction in comments.

Was anyone talking about.com bubble blowing up before it actually did ? Speculation of crypto bubble blowing up may actually be built into the cost

Then it's not speculation anymore if it's already priced that way -- either the bubble burst or it didn't.

Not really. Literally everyone, from HN to my grandmother, says that the crypto market is a bubble while most people were completely clueless right until the dotcom bubble burst.

Not sure why the other reply says there wasn't... I definitely remember speculation that .com shares were a bubble, even in the mainstream (UK) media.

Admittedly, the speculation that crypto currencies are a bubble does seem even stronger, but personally I don't find that surprising: it did seem feasible that .com companies could coexist, whereas crypto currencies seem to be offering the same product.

Approximately every cryptocurrency buyer hopes for massive gains in the short to medium term. I don't think I've seen a single article saying "This ICO is going to generate consistent 9% returns, that's better than an index fund!"

Because of that, I don't think the possibility of the bubble popping can be built into the cost in the way you're implying. If you think there's a 20% chance your investment will dectuple and a 80% chance you'll be wiped out, you can split the difference to find your expected value. But since none of the market participants believe the current value is the long-term value, eventually it has to land one way or the other.

Yes, there was extremely wide discussion in 1999 and 2000 about the dotcom party being typically somewhere between fraudulent and a giant bubble. The Buffett side of traditionalists won that argument, by a landslide. In the end, profits mattered, sales mattered, and something a lot closer to a traditional valuations model won out.

There was common discussion about junk dotcoms like TheGlobe.com, DrKoop.com, Geocities and dozens of others, and how they had no actual sustainable business (and often no plan for when they'd develop one). Scient, Viant, Razorfish, MarchFirst, and dozens of dotcom service companies were granted crazy valuations versus existing traditional peers (which is history rhyming re Ripple vs PayPal/Stripe/Square/Ant/etc).

The high burn rates, the lack of business models to actually make money, some that went public with practically no plans for how they'd make money at all, extremely high valuations on the few that were making money, and so on. These things were all very widely discussed, many skeptics were shouting about it, it wasn't popular to give them TV talking time (channels/sites like CNBC et al have a vested interest in pushing exuberence).

Yeah, small dent for the crypto. S.K. crypto trading will just move to shadows. That's it. Missed chance to tax it.

That is a criminally poor headline

article is not correct and has been refuted officially by the government.

Crypto is crashing badly right now because of this.

Actually as of now it's mostly recovered, ETH is back to around $1250 again.

Seems like the whole crypto is a lot more resilient than it used to be, or maybe I just jinxed it ;)

Seems like the original post might just be fud: http://m.ytn.co.kr/news_view.php?s_mcd=0101&key=201801111615...

Using Google Translate: "Cheong Wa Dae said the Justice Minister Park Sang-ki's remarks that the virtual currency exchange will be closed is not coordinated by the government.

A Cheong Wa Dae official said in a telephone conversation with YTN that Park's remarks are the position of the Ministry of Justice and that other ministries have various positions.

In addition, the Ministry of Justice approached from the dimension of elimination of speculation, but the Financial Services Commission explained that the Ministry of Science, Technology and MIC is interested in nurturing core technologies of virtual money to prevent similar reception.

He added that virtual currency-related policies will determine the best time for policies to be effective while looking at market conditions. "

and edit: this post isn't a month old

The article you cite is a month old.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com