Blue House responds to petition; Bitmain offers relocation assistance | The Daily Forkast

Transcript

Welcome to The Daily Forkast, June 24th, 2021. I’m Angie Lau, Editor-in-Chief of Forkast.News, covering all things blockchain.

Coming up, Korea’s Blue House offers its response to the petition calling for its FSC chairman to resign, Bitmain offers relocation assistance to miners and Lloyds to take crypto for classic cars. Let’s get you up to speed from Asia to the world.

Korea’s Blue House responds — well, sort of. The government was forced to issue a response after a national petition calling for the resignation of the Financial Services Commission’s chairman. Eun Sung-soo drew over 200,000 signatures, just in one month.

The petition came after Eun made comments back in April warning younger generation against crypto trading, which infuriated investors. But Korea’s government did a bit of a sidestep here. It ignored the actual demand for the chairman’s resignation and instead focused on what the government says is doing to support investors, like trying to offer a safety net for younger investors. But it also said that new crypto exchange regulations, which exchanges have to abide by before September 24th, are being designed to make trading safer and more transparent.

It seems only a resignation, though, is good enough for Korea’s young people to feel heard.

“The older generation accrued wealth through other means of speculation and grew up in a much less competitive society, without having to develop hard-earned skills. [The younger generation is frustrated] because the older generation looks at crypto with the [outdated] manufacturer-centric mindset.”

Meanwhile, separate to the petition response, chairman Eun has been answering questions on crypto from the National Assembly. In that meeting, Eun said that although his earlier remarks may have caused controversy, he still wanted to warn people that if exchanges fail to meet the new requirements by the end of September, the cryptocurrencies they hold will be valueless as they will be forced to shut down.

He also said it’s not his job to step in on delisting of small coins from exchanges as those are private business matters.

Korea’s, FSC chief, also is no fan of Elon Musk. When asked whether people can seek damages from Elon Musk for causing havoc with the price of Bitcoin, he said although Musk angers him, there’s no way Eun can make him legally responsible for the volatility he’s caused.

Speaking of Bitcoin, it was down 3.3% at just under US$33,000 as of 4 p.m. local Hong Kong time at the end of the Asian trading day. And in the top 10 for cryptocurrencies, a mixed day of trading saw Dogecoin up just under 6% and Cardano up almost 5%. Chinese mining rigmaker Bitmain is offering help to miners who want to relocate their operations overseas.

The move comes after the clampdown in China led to operations being shut down in several provinces. Now, in a statement on its WeChat account, Bitmain said it will offer a new hub service to help with any maintenance issues. It says that it will allow repair times for equipment returned from overseas to be shortened from three weeks to as little as four days.

After meeting that gathered crypto mining industry members together in Chengdu, the firm said it would continue to look out for good quality, clean energy resources. Bitmain has also offered to share its experience with overseas company registration, staff recruitment and operational compliance.

And finally, while Elon Musk might not be taking Bitcoin to buy a Tesla right now, you can always go back to the classics.

Australia’s Lloyds auction will now take crypto for classic cars.

Why? Well, they say it’s because more and more people are getting comfortable with the idea.

“It seems like there’s just a lot more moms and dads and regular people who have cryptocurrency available to be buying things with.”

But in fact, within hours of starting to offer crypto payments, Lloyds sold this camper for AU$100,000, or about US$76,000 worth of Bitcoin.

Using crypto to hit the open road in a world that’s increasingly using the more and more. Now, that’s the real adventure.

And that’s The Daily Forkast from our vantage point right here in Asia. For more, visit Forkast.News Editor-in-Chief Angie Lau. Until the next time.