Singapore’s Deputy PM: no compelling reason to ban Bitcoin

Tharman Shanmugaratnam, Deputy Prime Minister of Singapore, a former British colony and now a prominent city state and one of the financial hubs in Southeast Asia, has recently talked about the possible ban of cryptocurrency and, more particularly, Bitcoin.

As the Deputy PM responded to the inquiry from the members of the local parliament, cryptocurrencies are still at their experimental stage and before taking any regulative measures, one should see if they succeed as a financial tool at all. And even if they do, there is going to be some time before they become truly universally known, Tharman Shanmugaratnam implied. This is why there is no strong reason to ban Bitcoin right now, the Deputy Prime Minister of Singapore concluded.

This largely contradicts with the views of the high-ranking officials of China, who, as our regular readers undoubtedly know, decided to sabotage the local cryptocurrency environment by banning ICOs, exchanges and lately - even outlining the possibility of banning crypto websites.

Previously, the Monetary Authority of Singapore, the local central bank, decided to warn investors of possible ICO-related risks, which actually cannot be called very paranoid if we remember the number of scams and hacks in this sphere.