South Korea mulls cryptocurrency ban but it's far from finalized

News from South Korea is causing turmoil in the cryptocurrency market.

The country's Justice minister Park Sang-ki said the country is preparing a ban on cryptocurrency trading, Reuters reported Thursday.

The news likely caused a price correction of most major cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin, which is down 2.27 percent in the last 24 hours, and Ethereum, which is down 9.77 percent according to CoinMarketCap.

“There are great concerns regarding virtual currencies and the justice ministry is basically preparing a bill to ban cryptocurrency trading through exchanges,” Park said at a news conference.

Don't panic just yet. The president's office later said such a measure isn't finalized.

"Park's remarks are just one of the options on the table," said office spokesman Yoon Young-chan according to Korea Times.

"A bill will be introduced after detailed discussion between related government agencies," he said.

Even if a country-wide cryptocurrency ban were finalized, it might take "months or even years" for it to actually be passed into legislation, Reuters claims.

In Sept. 2017, China ordered all local cryptocurrency exchanges to close, triggering a large Bitcoin sell-off. The cryptocurrency market recovered later that year, with Bitcoin and many other coins reaching all-time highs in December.

South Korea's regulators chimed in on the subject several times in the past few months, each time promising stricter regulation of the booming market. In Dec. 2017, the country made it more difficult to trade cryptocurrencies anonymously, threatening the possibility to ban cryptocurrency trading altogether.

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Cryptocurrencies are very popular in Korea, and prices are often significantly higher there than in other markets -- to the point that cryptocurrency market cap tracker CoinMarketCap recently excluded Korean exchange prices from the price averages of popular coins.

The current price of Bitcoin at popular Korean exchange Bithumb is $18,301, down 7.13 percent in the last 24 hours, but still significantly higher than CoinMarketCap's current average price of $13,840.

Disclosure: The author of this text owns, or has recently owned, a number of cryptocurrencies, including BTC and ETH.