INDIA AND CRYPTO
India’s government plans to introduce a new bill that will effectively ban all cryptocurrencies in the country. If it comes into force, citizens who use crypto would be facing fines of up to 250 million Indian rupees (around $3,3 million) or up to ten years in prison, Economic Times reported today.
According to ET’s high ranking sources who are close to the government, this new effort was primarily caused by The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) standing down after the Supreme Court ruled it couldn't ban crypto traders and crypto-related firms from accessing banking services.
Now, the Indian government is reportedly seeking to enforce a blanket ban on Bitcoin, believing that the RBI’s previous circular was not effective enough.
Indian youth don't want crypto to be banned in India as many people started their businesses of crypto trading platforms.
Shetty explained that “With the bank ban in India it was important to surface the importance of India adopting crypto,” elaborating, “To do that, educating the government and the masses is the first step. This campaign’s objective is to spread awareness so that our government takes the right step towards crypto.”
His series of tweets began with the message: “Please bring positive regulations in crypto and over 5 million crypto Indians will be thankful to you. The youth of India have found a new way to make wealth & this is especially important when there are not enough jobs for everyone.” Among the Twitter accounts he regularly tags are those for the country’s Minister of Finance and Corporate Affairs, Arun Jaitley, and Narendra Modi, the Prime Minister.
INDIA WANTS CRYPTO!
Wazirx published its January performance report on Wednesday, claiming that it has consistently reached 50 BTC in daily trading volume. This announcement follows another on Jan. 23 which states that “Within 6 months of P2P launch, we’ve crossed Rs. 100 crores [~$14 million] worth of P2P trades.”
Another local crypto exchange, Instashift, is also seeing positive growth. Marketing officer Jacob Mani revealed to news.Bitcoin.com that his exchange’s Indian trading volume “is increasing day by day slowly with a lot of buyer and seller activity.” He added: “In the past two weeks, there were two days when [the number of] sellers were quite more than buyers. So, there is a promising market activity in India.” Instashift operates in 45 countries including India
Even as plans are afoot to launch a digital rupee, India proposes to ban cryptocurrencies altogether, and the law is reportedly in the works that would make holding cryptocurrencies a crime that would put you in jail. RBI has already banned cryptocurrencies. This is myopic. India needs to be open to the possibility of using cryptocurrencies for international payments bypassing the dollar.
Cryptocurrencies have a bad name and that is probably well-earned. But all currencies that move around using the blockchain technology are not of the same kind. A subgroup is called stablecoins. Unlike bitcoins, which can be produced independently of any central bank, whose value is unstable and whose total numbers would hit a predetermined ceiling, stablecoins are linked to fiat currency, managed by banks and other reliable entities.
Don’t Think Just Bitcoin
The principal attraction of a new stable coin — there are many floating around, apart from Facebook’s proposed Libra — is the possibility of using that for settling international payments that do not involve a US counterparty, without using the dollar.
At the time when negotiations were on to create the International Monetary Fund, John Maynard Keynes had proposed, on behalf of the British government, creation of Bancor, a new unit of account for settling international payments in a new International Clearing Union. The Americans poohpoohed the idea and said the dollar would do quite well as the world’s currency for settling international payments, thank you.
The war-ravaged Brits were in no position to resist the pressure of the US, then financing much of the Allies’ war effort, and Bancor went into that heap of good ideas in history that never saw the light of day.
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