South Korea’s crackdown on bitcoin and cryptocurrency trading has turned into a comedic farce worthy of a Shakespeare play, with reports saying that the government is racked with serious infighting over how to go forward with it.

The first act of the farce started in October when South Korea’s finance minister said it was reviewing the role of cryptocurrencies with a view to introducing “countermeasures against virtual money.” The closing stanzas of the first act came with a building crescendo in December when the government first announced an emergency meeting to review cryptocurrencies followed by the announcement of regulations just prior to the new year.

The second act, deep in the middle of a cold South Korean winter, came Thursday when South Korea’s justice minister announced at a press conference that the country would ban cryptocurrency trading outright because of “great concerns regarding virtual currencies.”

As the second act continued, it became a winter of discontent, with South Korea’s Ministry of Strategy and Finance saying Friday that “it does not support or agree with the decision of the Ministry of Justice to ban cryptocurrency trading” and that it was not even aware of the announcement before reading about it in the media.

The third act started in South Korea’s Blue House, the official residence of the country’s president, which issued a statement Friday saying that “there will be no ban on bitcoin trading in the near future,” both confirming that a ban won’t be happening anytime soon but not saying it’s off the table either.

“Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t” may be a line from Hamlet, but as the fourth act of this story only starts to be written in the week ahead, the method in the madness is yet to be revealed. Reuters reported that the South Korean government said Monday morning local time that its plans to ban virtual coin exchanges had not yet been finalized as government agencies were still in talks to decide how to regulate the market.

“The plan to ban cryptocurrency exchanges, recently mentioned by the nation’s justice minister, is one measure in talks to curb speculative investments, which the government will carry on with enough discussion for before finalizing the decision,” an official at the Office for Government Policy Coordination is reported to have told a news conference.

So will South Korea ban bitcoin and cryptocurrency trading or won’t they in the final act? As Caesar says to Brutus in the first act of Julius Caesar, “Men at some time are masters of their fates. The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.”

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