Bitcoin prices continued to slide on Thursday, after South Korea’s justice minister, Park Sang-ki, announced that the country’s government is moving forward with legislation that would prohibit bitcoin trading on more than a dozen domestic exchanges. At a press conference, Park candidly noted that “There are great concerns regarding virtual currencies and justice ministry is basically preparing a bill to ban cryptocurrency trading through exchanges.” After the bill is drafted it will require a majority vote in the country’s 297-member National Assembly in order to be passed into law, a process that will almost certainly take months, if not longer.
South Korean tax authorities and police have recently raided the country’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges, sending a signal that they’re cracking down, and causing ripples of panic among South Korean cryptocurrency investors, many of whom opted to cash out, another prompt responsible for sending the prices lower.
Signs of Trouble
Bitcoin prices slumped as much as 21 percent by the early afternoon in Asia, with Coinbase reporting a value of $13,193.72 as of 2:00 p.m HK/SIN. The cryptocurrency is down 20.77 percent since December 2017.
In an odd twist that signals additional trouble for the cryptocurrency, the North American Bitcoin Conference scheduled to be held in Miami next week has stopped accepting payments in bitcoin, claiming that network congestion and manual processing demands complicated last-minute registrations, and that bitcoin payments could only be used to purchase tickets at least two weeks before the conference. Bitcoin transactions are known for their fairly slow transaction times and comparatively high transaction fees, giving most merchants pause before agreeing to accept the digital currency. According to some analyses, the average time it takes to confirm a bitcoin transaction is 51 minutes, and the average transaction fee over the past three months was $55. As reported by CNBC, many merchants are pausing or canceling the option to pay for their products using bitcoin due to the headache and expenses involved. Some such merchants are Microsoft which temporarily halted bitcoin payments in December, and the gaming platform Steam.