The city of Shanghai, and other metropolitan centers throughout China, have been reduced effectively to “ghost towns” — creepy social media reports and footage from the country appear to show almost no pedestrians or cars on the streets, and those few that do walk outside wear heavy anti-microbial masks and walk briskly to limit their time in the open air.

City authorities are spraying chemicals in the air to limit the spread of the coronavirus, and sterilizing sidewalks and streets. It’s like something from a dystopian sci-fi novel. Yet the Chinese still have their purchasing power — they are locked inside their apartments and homes, bored out of their minds, with Internet access and less fear of angering their government if they trade using cryptocurrencies… their government appears to have put nearly all its focus, for the moment, on battling the coronavirus and scaling up treatment centers as necessary to heal those already infected.

Before China began to crackdown on cryptocurrency usage, it was a crypto mining hotbed, and the source of one of the largest user bases of crypto on the planet. An unspecified number of people in China still conduct business using cryptocurrency.

In America and most Western countries, cryptocurrency investing is a legal and highly regulated area. American billionaires including Google’s former chairman, Eric Schmidt, and SpaceX’s Elon Musk — as well as Netscape cofounder Marc Andreessen — have said positive things about cryptocurrency’s potential.

According to coincap.io data, Bitcoin is up 29.09% in US dollar value over the last month, while Ethereum is up 66.28% during that time period, and Litecoin is up 71.92%.

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