Topic: Indian government seeks public comments on how bitcoin can be regulated. (Read 629 times)

Regulating crypto currencies is actually extremely simple: you ask every "official" user of a crypto, to keep an official bookkeeping for inspection.  You may even make a block chain application for that !  In that bookkeeping ledger, you are required to declare all crypto you receive, and from where it comes, for what purpose.  That's all.  The crypto can be as anonymous as you want, and as decentralized as you want, the simple thing is that you're not *supposed* to own any crypto of which you've not declared its possession.

Mind you that nobody is going to come and lay their hands on your computers to verify whether you don't possess secret keys of one or other crypto.  No.  But the point is that you cannot spend *publicly* any crypto that you didn't declare its origin from.  You can hold as many bitcoin, DASH, Monero, ZCash, Shadowcash or whatever.  But you cannot spend a single one of those in an official place if you didn't declare where it came from, including exchanges.  Of course, you can use foreign exchanges to swap your bitcoin for monero, then transact them to yet another exchange and so on.  But in the end, if you want to spend them, say, at Indian Airlines to buy an airline ticket, and you pay say 1.5 BTC for the ticket, Indian Airlines will report that YOU, Joe Sixpack, bought an airline ticket for 1.5 BTC.  Now, officials can go and check how many bitcoin you declared.  Maybe you declared that 3 years ago, you bought 5 BTC on an exchange.  OK.  Leaves you 3.5 officially useful BTC. 

If ever you try to pay 3 other things at Amazon India, and the total amount passes 4 BTC, then officials will (automatically) know that you were fraudulent: you've paid in total more than the 3.5 BTC you declared, with BTC.  ==> you're in trouble.
Imagine that you had obtained in fact extra BTC because you speculated on an exchange.  No problem.  You simply had to report it ; in fact, the exchange will do it for you when you withdraw coins: "Joe Sixpack has received 5 BTC from our place". 

This doesn't stop using crypto in an underground economy.  But you cannot get this crypto out of the underground circuit to use it officially.  Exactly like "dirty cash". 

In 2016, India had 1,326,801,576 people, but for the period 2011-12, poverty stood at 12.4% of the total population, or about 172 million

people.  The thing is 1,326,801,576 people with a few Satoshi's are better than 1 000 000 people with whole bitcoins. { if that makes sense }

We need to put more bitcoins in millions of people's hands and not 1000's of bitcoins in the hands of a few people. {whales} 

But I dought that Indian government will do it so fast because the even USA and many developed countries are not done yet. Also, the Indian government didn't allow even Paypal to do a business because they want to track all the transactions and want to put taxes on each transaction which I think Paypal didn't agree. How are they going to put a taxes on bitcoin transactions? I think it will be a just discussion but they may fail in regulating it.

Obviously, if the Indian government decides to regulate bitcoins then it would come under RBI which means FEMA act would be imposed on bitcoins.

https://www.mygov.in/group-issue/commentssuggestions-invited-existing-virtual-currencies-framework/

The government is mostly concerned about consumer protection.



India already has 400+ Fintech startups and the government legalising bitcoins would definitely lead to large scale BTC adoption in India.

The main reason I believe something like this is probable is primarily because of the fact that Bitcoin isn't fungible by design... if you have a currency where you can effectively be able to look at a wallet and see 1)how much you have, and 2) where it came from; you are just opening up a bunch of possibilities for regulation... especially if you buy your coins from a super centralized exchange (i.e. coinbase).

the need to tax everyone who converts BTC to fiat and vice versa 

They can regulate it though by creating the national wallet where every Indian would use it together with some verifications and should be made as the only way to convert Bitcoin to their own currency that is attracting theajor wallet provider in their country to wprk for them. I don't really know if it is probable. They can release a law that no one should release any other wallets but theirs alone. Or let the wallet providers have their own company so instead they will make them cooperate with the government for the sake of the country. They can also hire experts in technology or programmer to monitor and do some actions that are needed and might as well ask for their advice regarding the issue at hand.

Exactly but their influence can spark a public interest and so if India by their population numbers get involved they can actually regulate it by creating the demand for the coins prices to shoot up. So I'd say they can indirectly regulate the prices.

And how are they gonna do that, without any community and economic consensus?
You make it sound so easy, you're implying that the Indian government has control of Bitcoin in any shape of form, yet it's very obvious that you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.

Maybe you should go ahead and integrate India's supposed biometric database into the Bitcoin's blockchain. Maybe the Indian gov't will reward you handsomely. Or maybe not, their funds are as scarce as their toilets after all.

Bitcoin can be regulated only by the core devs and miners.
The Indian government can`t do anyhting about that.
They can only observe the bitcoin growth.

It's all good news if the Indian government has started backing down on his initial decisions against Bitcoin. The community will expand as a result be an increased demand from India (having huge numbers) will meaning more money for us the investors.

Just put an RFID chip in everybody's asshole. That should be a reasonable form of regulation.


You can put forward any evidence you want, they will only do that their corporate masters will tell them to do. I am not talking specifically about India, but most regulatory schemes are crafted by corporate lobbyists (banks).

The united states being $20 trillion in debt & the EU being $12 trillion in debt could be evidence of official regulation being an inferior system to bitcoin's decentralized and cryptographic inflation control schemes. Likewise there have been numerous cases of banks laundering money for mexican drug cartels, terrorist organizations and shady russian groups.

Before talks of bitcoin regulation could begin in earnest some effort should be made to prove that regulation has tangible advantages it can offer crypto. One could make the case that regulation is inferior and regulating bitcoin would only reduce its quality and consistency.

So many andreas bunk stories from the crypt, completely detached from the real world.

Give me a difficult question.

The Indian govt has all their monkeys on a biometric database, complete with biometric ID cards.

Integrate that into the bitcoin blockchain and you're done.  No country has it that simple right now.

Apropo, you may have some space problems and a few angry anarchists to deal with. 

Good luck!

Bitcoin by design can not be regulated, and even if it could, the only country that would be able to do it would be China.
Then again, it wouldn't be to any degree of importance, there's only so much the PBOC can do.

They can ban Bitcoin all they want, people will still use it.

Indian government has recently asked public comments on how bitcoin can be regulated.I think it has come one step down.At first,it was discussing how bitcoins could be banned.Now it has asked people to comment whether bitcoin should be regulated,banned or observed.One person has commented that it would be better to stop the misuses of crypto currencies instead of banning it.If government goes with the suggestion of this above person,then it would be beneficial for the progress of both indian economy and Bitcoin community.