Chinese President Xi Jinping allegedly said that cryptocurrencies could be included in the list of illegal things in the future.
Actually, there is still a formal ban on cryptocurrencies in China, although recently it seemed that the country was opening up to these technologies.
However, the President has made it clear that he considers them risky because they are used for criminal purposes, so he does not rule out that in the near future they may even be included among the prohibited tools precisely because they could encourage crime.
The current Chinese ban, in fact, only concerns the prohibition of exchanging fiat currency for cryptocurrencies and not the use of the same. The words of Xi Jinping suggest that, in the future, measures could also be taken in this direction.
Moreover, as Dovey Wan points out, a television programme was broadcast in China on CCTV1, the official channel of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), according to which cryptocurrencies are unregistered securities, should be considered a Ponzi scheme and consequently constitute a financial fraud.
JUST IN 🤭🤭🤭
Today CCTV1 (CCP official channel) featured another investigative work of “cryptocurrency” on 焦点访谈, which I would considered 60 minutes or even higher profile TV program
TL;DR – cryptocurrency is unregistered security, financial fraud and illegal ponzi pic.twitter.com/gLqIjXDsqI
— Dovey "Rug the fiat" Wan (@DoveyWan) November 18, 2019
At the same time, however, China is about to launch its own digital state currency, and the president himself has said he is very much in favour of the development of blockchain-based technologies in the country.
This hard-to-read attitude of the country resembles in some ways that of India, where, for example, many attempts to put a stop to the use of cryptocurrencies have failed.
The problem probably lies in the fact that political bodies with great powers are struggling to understand the utility and revolutionary scope of decentralised technologies, to the extent that the very uses they imagine do not seem to grasp this opportunity at all.
Although they are trying to impose a vision that considers blockchain to be something good, and decentralised cryptocurrencies to be something bad, they do not understand that without decentralised cryptocurrencies blockchain is by no means a revolutionary nor a particularly innovative technology.
Therefore, by sidestepping decentralisation, these technologies will not be able to make a real difference.
The fact is that decentralization undermines the state and that is precisely why it was chosen as the basis for the development of cryptocurrencies, which frightens the most authoritarian governments. However, decentralisation makes cryptocurrencies unstoppable, hence authoritarian governments’ opposition to decentralised cryptocurrencies could prove to be a lost battle at the outset, just as it is happening in India and just as it could also happen in China in the future.
