A January 18th CNBC report discusses the impact of potential cryptocurrency bans in Asia, and suggests a number of ways in which these might be circumvented. Since this is a young market, there is no global consensus of how it might be regulated, and current legislation varies from country to country.

Japan, for example, has accepted bitcoin as legal tender and pioneered its own set of industry rules, which is encouraging a colossal ecosystem of investors and companies involved with digital assets. Nearby regions like Hong Kong and Singapore maintain only light trading regulations, while in Europe Germany has been notable for saying that it would be useless to try and impose national restrictions.

If a ban is imposed, industry experts suggest that the first step to getting round it is to use a VPN (Virtual Private Network) to hide IP addresses from the authorities, and continue trading as usual. Many exchanges are wholly decentralised, like Stellar Dex or Shapeshift, so they can be used anonymously and accessed from anywhere.

These exchanges link to highly encrypted digital wallets which maintain anonymity, so authorities would require a warrant to search computers for proof of crypto trading activity if exchanges were banned. The wallet holder could still claim to have forgotten the password since such legislation was enacted, unless actually caught mid-trade.