Why is virtual currency trading explicitly banned in the country? In simple terms, it's like a super fast lane without traffic lights, traffic police, or surveillance—ordinary people entering face risks far greater than opportunities. The policy does not prevent exploration, but at this stage, it chooses to first build protective dikes to prevent the public from being overwhelmed by uncontrollable financial waves.
Illegal cryptocurrencies have already perfectly bypassed foreign exchange controls to some extent. If cryptocurrencies were allowed legally, they could even directly undermine the fourth phase of the gold tax.
If you sell a house in a first-tier city and get 5 million cash, you want to convert that money to 700,000 US dollars to transfer abroad.
The bank has a 50,000 quota for currency exchange, and remittances also have a 50,000 quota, a double insurance, requiring 14 years to complete the transfer.
If you use someone else's quota to exchange for cash in US dollars, manually exit the country, carrying over 5,000 will be regulated.
If you use someone else's quota to remit to your overseas card, you will be monitored if more than 3 people are involved. If you want to take RMB out of the country and then exchange for foreign currency, you cannot carry more than 20,000 in one trip.
If you want to remit RMB abroad, sorry, you cannot remit a single cent; all legal pathways you can imagine are blocked. Now back to cryptocurrencies.
If there are no quota restrictions, it perfectly bypasses them. If there are quota restrictions, assuming a reference foreign currency of 50,000 US dollars, you can use someone else's quota. Fourteen people can help you exchange 5 million RMB, then store it on a USB drive to take abroad. As long as you don’t say anything, no one will know.
In summary: Cryptocurrency, in a sense, is close to a general equivalent of precious metals. It has properties similar to precious metals: decentralization and anonymous transactions, which leads to a state of complete loss of control for centralized national finances.
With the advancement of the times, precious metals gradually withdraw from the circulation field, mainly due to the laws of physics at play. Compared to fiat currency, they are too inconvenient. However, cryptocurrencies are not bound by physical laws, making them almost as convenient as payment platforms like Alipay and PayPal.
Even if we set aside foreign exchange control for a moment, if everyone truly used cryptocurrencies, the fourth phase of the gold tax would become a joke. Who can tolerate that?
