New reporting from Samuel Haig at Cointelegraph this morning show the Vietnamese government pondering cryptocurrency policy. Haig reports various Vietnamese officials stakeholders are putting a research coalition together to help set blockchain policy moving forward.
“The research group will help the country stay abreast of new developments within the rapidly evolving blockchain sector, allowing Vietnam to respond to regulatory challenges with greater agility,” Haig writes.
Like other world governments before them, Vietnam’s official apparatus is evaluating whether to fully ban a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin, to limit its use, or to take a more laissez-faire approach, allowing citizens to buy, sell, spend and even mine to their hearts’ content.
Larger world governments have, in some cases, tried a fairly comprehensive Bitcoin ban. This idea was on the table for the Indian government in past years, although it never came to pass. China, for its own part, has gone back and forth on cryptocurrency, and last year, cryptic language by Xi led to a temporary BTC boom.
In the United States, and elsewhere, there’s the cautionary idea that any attempt to ban Bitcoin is likely to be less than fully effective. It’s a global economy, and it’s unclear how outlawing ownership of digital assets would work, especially in modern democracies like the U.S., where private online brokerage capacity is so ubiquitous.
Take a look at this Forbes article from last summer, where U.S. government officials discussed how a Bitcoin ban would potentially work … or not work.
“On Tuesday, the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs held a hearing on cryptocurrency and blockchain technology regulation,” reported Kyle Torpey June 30.
“During that hearing, Senate Banking Committee Chairman Mike Crapo (R-ID) shared his belief that the United States would not be able to succeed in banning Bitcoin,” Torpey continued, quoting Crapo this way:
“’If the United States were to decide — and I’m not saying that it should — if the United States were to decide we don’t want cryptocurrency to happen in the United States and tried to ban it, I’m pretty confident we couldn’t succeed in doing that because this is a global innovation,’ said Crapo.”
With Binance, a major player, adding a fiat currency on-ramp for Vietnamese traders, the Vietnamese government might want to take a page from what American legislators are saying. It probably applies all over the world.
