Korea, South Korea, Republic of Korea, not-North Korea has been at the forefront of crypto and virtual currencies.
A decade or so ago, one could purchase via telephone or via your phone contract, an Acorn at about $0.10. This was used on the Cywold platform. A social media site around the time of MySpace and Facebook.
Users could use acorns to send to friends or to purchase upgrades to their "mini-hompey" or "mini-homepage".
So you could design your home any way you wished using these acorns.
Koreans are no strangers to this sort of technology. They embraced Smartphones and now dominate the world in the technology (Samsung /LG) and are most tech savvy people I've seen.
It is not surprising that they embraced Crypto in a heartbeat around November 2017. Young Koreans who see their country as "Hell Chosun", which refers to Korea's ancient ruling Kingdom, have watch how badly mismanaged their country really became.
The 2014 sinking of the Sewol Ship which killed over 300 people was, in my opinion, a catalyst for this immediate jump to a new technology.
A technology that doesn't have social rules. A tech that doesn't have to abide by any government fiat. A tech that is so rooted in Math, Computer programming and Economics that the old generation were never going to be able to understand nor touch it.
The jump into crypto was only a natural outcome of the mess that people saw.
Then came the wild speculations and the Kimchi Premiums.
Korean exchanges, due to the massive demand here, were selling at a 30% premium. It was ripe for Arbitrage. The cracks in the wall started to show.
Too many people were making easy cash. And by easy, let me demonstrate how easy it is for Koreans.
Korea already has real-name verification. If you open a bank account or a cellphone account, you are required to follow the same procedures.
I opened a Korbit account with minimal difficulty as a foreigner in a day or so. My wife, who is Korean, opened an account in about 20 minutes and transferred money in under 5 minutes. She was able to trade in 25 minutes.
The ease of this caused the government to take a closer look. There were not KYC or AMA regulations here. Koreans were still approved in under a day at the most.
The government at the time didn't know what to do with it. Crypto was a new world. They vehemently denied its legitimacy but at the same vowed to protect the vulnerable.
One one hand, accept it as a viable and true source of investment thus legitimizing something that is potentially dangerous, or deny it until regulations were put in place so as to tax the shit out of it.
You see, this was the wild West. No taxes. You know where the rest of this story is going.
Shortly after New Years in 2018 the Korean government pretty much their foot down.
The rest, is just a bunch of speculation, guesses and just plain uninformed guessing.
I'm still waiting for the wild days. I hope you are as well.