A more "sober" perspective on Hong Kong and crypto. Let's stop smoking the China "hopium."

Context: I've been to China and I've been to Hong Kong, in both cases for work.

To speed up the conversation here: the currency people use in Hong Kong is the HKD, and in mainland China, people use the RMB. In mainland China, you cannot access YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, any western websites at all. In Hong Kong you can - or so last I checked that's how things work there.

I don't see how, if for any reason, Hong Kong's regional government encouraging crypto trading will lead to China "unrestricting" crypto for all of its people. If you are from China and you want to go to Hong Kong, you need to have a visa to go there with few exceptions - like perhaps you're in the Chinese military and you were cracking down on the protests a couple of years ago. Another exception might be a high-net-worth individual from China that has legitimate reason to start a business in Hong Kong that they might have difficulty starting in China (Example: a new social networking website, or starting a new APAC-based hedge fund management group).

There are, of course, back-door methods for a person in China to get their money into Hong Kong to buy crypto, but these methods are even riskier than using OTC methods to buy crypto in China (which can lead to your WeChat pay or Alipay accounts getting restricted/punished). I heard a story about a Taiwanese actress who went to China for work a few years ago, and she wanted to get all of her money out of China and into a Taiwanese bank account. China has capital-flight controls, meaning they limit the amount of money you can take out of the country. So, what did this actress do? She talked to a mafia boss and said she wanted to get all of her money out of China and into a Taiwanese bank account. The mafia boss did everything to make it look like they were swapping money, but ran off with all of her money (probably hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars) and disappeared.

Anyone trying to make a connection between Hong Kong's crypto industry and mainland China encouraging crypto trading is smoking too much hopium.