Any and all websites offering cryptocurrency trading services or advertising the digital currency market have been scrubbed from search engines and social media in China in a bid to wipe out the trade.
Authorities have already banned ICOs and domestic exchanges and are now blocking access to both domestic ands foreign services “to prevent financial risk”.
China has a long tradition of blocking unwanted websites thanks to the so-called ‘Great Firewall of China’ and it seems this process could now extend to blockchain technologies in 2018.
A source from People’s Bank of China-affiliated Financial News said: “Overseas transactions and regulatory evasion have resumed.
“Risks are still there, fuelled by illegal issuance, and even fraud and pyramid selling.” Bitcoin news: Will Bitcoin go back up? Cryptocurrency CRASHING amid Lloyds and China ban
Now a further crackdown could be on the cards with the latest firewall blanket ban.
The potential ban in China comes after banks in Britain and the United States banned the use of credit cards to buy Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.
Lloyds, Britain's biggest lender, said it would ban its credit card customers from buying crypto following the lead of US banking giants JP Morgan Chase & Co and CitigroupThe move is aimed at protecting customers from running up huge debts from buying virtual currencies on credit, if their values were to plummet, a Lloyds spokeswoman saidConcerns have arisen among credit card providers because their customers have increasingly been using credit cards to fund accounts on online exchanges, which are then used to purchase the digital currencies.
Last week Mastercard, the world's second-biggest payments network, said customers buying cryptocurrencies with credit cards fuelled a 1 percent increase in overseas transaction volumes