China's recent hardline stance towards cryptocurrency has not been able to stop the brightest minds in the Chinese crypto industry from continuing with what they do. It has just led to a brain drain with some of the smartest crypto enthusiasts leaving the country like refugees to set up shop elsewhere. This is a problem for China as this would mean that the best minds in blockchain technology would also bid goodbye to the country as they relocate to places more conducive to the work they do, such as New York, Paris, Tokyo and London.
These crypto experts who are moving away need nothing beyond a laptop and a smartphone to continue functioning as blockchain developers or cryptocurrency traders. The successful crypto traders find it hardly difficult to find a place to stay in a foreign country of their choice or tourist visa in a country with conducive regulations.
In 2017, the island of Vanuatu had begun to offer a scheme where one could buy citizenship over Bitcoin. Naturally the new residents would be able to freely trade in cryptocurrencies once they arrived there. Even Antigua saw a scheme of similar kinds offered by Coingeek.
Recently, China has cracked down rather hard on the crypto scene by banning citizens from accessing foreign exchanges with a blocker touted as the "Great Firewall". Naturally, batches of young crypto enthusiasts and entrepreneurs are choosing to leave the country in search of places that would at least allow them to work, if not serve as crypto havens. However, the country's administration is interested in blockchain technology and has even invested a whopping sum of $3 billion in blockchain initiatives in the recent days.
In that context, the outward flight of crypto experts would also cripple the prospects of blockchain in the country. The country had also taken other rather strict decisions earlier, banning world-famous sites like search engine Google, video sharing platform YouTube and social networking site Facebook. Till mass adoption is reached, observers say, trading and blockchain technology are essentially complementary and supplementary to one another and cutting off the blood to one can naturally hurt the prospects of the other and that is what is happening in China.