The issue
6 hours ago, the most popular Bitcoin exchange company of Nepal - Bitsewa announced in a Facebook post that they are suspending all bitcoin-transactions and customers will not be able to buy or sell bitcoins hereafter.
The reason
The deputy director of NRB (Nepal Rashtra Bank), Mr. Kedar Prasad Acharya said "Bitcoins are illegal in Nepal." in a college event.
Yes, you read that right. Just because this person says that bitcoins are illegal in a college event, it becomes illegal. Please keep in mind that this person is a representative of a National Bank and not the representative of the Government. There are no bills passed or proposed regarding any take on Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency by the Government whatsoever. Suddenly this dude when asked about the legality of bitcoin in a college event, says that it's illegal and the major exchange decides to suspend all the bitcoin transactions indefinitely until any further changes occur.
Questions to be asked:
- Under what circumstances is bitcoin illegal?
- Nepal has a written constitution and there's no written document that precisely articulates the circumstances or terms under which the usage of bitcoin violates any law and becomes illegal.
- What is "illegal"? - The Ambiguity.
- From the above point, we know that there's no point of reference for legality of bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency in Nepal. So, what do we interpret the word "illegal" as? The interpretation could be very ambiguous.
- What are the consequences? - Assign the value of x.
- Now that we know that bitcoin is supposedly illegal in Nepal, one would ought to know the consequences of using bitcoins. What's the penalty if any? Well, since there's no point of reference, the penalty becomes whatever they say is the penalty when they press charges against you.
Since they said "Bitcoins are illegal in Nepal", does it mean other cryptocurrencies are illegal too?
Apparently they're not. The exchange claims that other cryptocurrencies are still legal in the country because only bitcoin was quoted to be illegal. This sounds insanely absurd and it actually is. The exchange is assuring people that other "trading" other coins should be perfectly fine unless and it's just bitcoins that they'll suspend the trading of and that it'll be adding Ripple to the list of currencies in a few days.
It's a chaos!
The entire country has been under a political chaos over a decade. It took the politicians of the country nearly a decade to unanimously agree upon the constitution with recurring elections every few months. It was and is still chaotic. The Earthquake hit country really hard around this time last year and it was devastating. However, the people are upset with the government for not distributing the aid-funds properly and for using the funds for personal usage. Perhaps they could use blockchain to track and do exactly that, instead of calling something illegal without any prior notice or without even properly studying it for a concrete period of time.