Malaysia should make digital currencies legal tender, Ministry proposes

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El Salvador made the misguided move and made BTC legal tender, which backfired massively on the Central American nation. However, this has done little to deter others from considering a similar move, with the latest being Malaysia.

As Bloomberg reports, the deputy minister for Communications and Multimedia revealed that the ministry has already proposed the move to the government, and it hopes that it can come onboard and make digital assets legally recognized as tender.

“We hope the government can allow this. We are trying to see how we can legalize this so that we can develop youth participation in crypto and assist them,” Deputy Minister Zahidi Zainul Abidin stated, speaking to parliament this week. 

This is the first time that a Malaysian government official has hinted at the possibility of making digital currencies legal tender. If anything, the Malaysian government has been rather anti-BTC for a long time, throwing the latest proposal into question.

The Malaysian central bank, known as the Bank Negara Malaysia, has discouraged the public from getting into digital currencies, which it says pose a danger to investors due to their unregulated nature. 

In December 2021, Deputy Finance Minister Yamani Hafez Musa further doubled down on the attack against digital currencies, claiming that they lack the qualities of sound money and, as such, can’t be recognized as legal tender in Malaysia.

“Cryptocurrencies are not suitable to be used as a payment instrument as the currencies do not show the universal characteristics of money,” he said.

Yamani singled out the volatile prices of most digital currencies as their Achilles’ heel in their pursuit of legal tender status. He further claimed that they are prone to cyber-attacks and can’t scale (but Bitcoin SV scales unbounded with its massive uncapped block sizes).

So far, only El Salvador has made a digital currency legal tender. In a move that was sanctioned by the country’s fascist leader Nayib Bukele, the country passed the Bitcoin Law, forcing BTC as legal tender on the people. BTC can’t scale and processes just seven transactions per second at sky-high fees, and so naturally, the move has been one big disaster for Bukele. 

Watch: CoinGeek New York presentation, Digital Currency as a Tool for Financial Inclusion