Topic: What if India or China declares bitcoin as legal tender in the country ? (Read 431 times)

It is, but it's taxed, as it was said - so, they don't utilize it to its full potential, so to speak.

Does not need to be declared legal tender. The main thing is that is accessible as a savings technology to citizens in both countries - which of course it is.

Although India legalized bitcoin years ago but with taxes as high as 30%, the country has never been considered a crypto-friendly nation.

I read that news yesterday too, some news said they are considering banning bitcoin/crypto to focus on building and developing their own CBDC. But I don't think they will do that because bitcoin is basically just considered a commodity in their country, banning bitcoin will only make them lose tax revenue.
India and China are both countries that have an unfriendly attitude towards cryptocurrencies, so I think it is somewhat delusional to expect them to legalize bitcoin as a currency.



https://cryptoslate.com/india-favors-cbdcs-over-crypto-like-bitcoin-despite-top-rank-in-global-adoption/

El Sal is not that big and shiny to create the demand - on the other hand, look at India and Chine 
No wonder they want to create their CBDC, they want the game to be on their own turfs.

As we have seen in El Salvador, declaring Bitcoin to be legal tender won’t really do a lot to create demand. It will at least create a positive environment in countries that have been hostile to Bitcoin and we might see more people starting businesses that focus on Bitcoin.

The latest news that I have heard is that India will get even stricter against cryptocurrency because they want to create their own CBDC. The odds of Bitcoin becoming legal tender in that country are slim to none.

Yeah, it will only happen if pros will outweigh the BTC not being regulated on Chinese soil  Maybe it will happen and it will have a positive effect, however, it's only a speculation.

India has been legalizing bitcoin for a long time and there are some rumors that they are planning to ban it to focus on CBDC development. Meanwhile, China has banned bitcoin since 2017 until now.

Everyone is optimistic and believes that if these 2 countries legalize bitcoin it will have a big impact on bitcoin price but I don't think so. I mean we should take into account factors like each country's GDP as well as their regulations towards bitcoin. A populous country with low per capita income and harsh policies will not bring too many big benefits, and that is exactly what the Indian government is doing with the cryptocurrency industry. They legalized it but taxed it high and the average income in India is not high so that's why we don't see much impact from them on bitcoin.
I rate China higher because they are the second largest economy, but if they legalize and enact strict regulations, I will not be optimistic either.

The answer is simple for sure it can drive the demand for bitcoin. Imagine how many people are there in those country, for sure the limited supply of bitcoin would be not enough and guess what happen next? The price of bitcoin would provably rise up and maybe this would became more valuable if that good event happen.

But we cannot expect that this acceptance would happen as easy as we think. Since for sure for now this event is not gonna happen especially the government of both countries doesn't show any sign that they would think about doing that or at least they became a crypto friendly nation.

Yes, it can take some time for all people to be able to use it but it can be fast also in some cases depending on how it is implemented and promoted.

Like digital payments were encouraged by Indian government heavily and as a result even the weaker section of the society have started using digital payment options like UPI. 

What you dream about has the same chance of happening as if you wake up tomorrow, open your BTC wallet and see that Satoshi sent you 1 million BTC

China as a communist country will never accept anything that it cannot control and that is why they banned BTC - and India is not far from doing the same in the future considering some of their crazy ideas that they already had and the fact that they are increasingly moving away from the West and they connect with China, Russia and similar countries, especially when it comes to BRICS.

Even if this were to happen in some strange development of events, one should not live in the belief that Bitcoin as a legal tender means that people will use it - the example of El Salvador has shown this best.

Those are the two most populated countries of the world and they both account for over 3% of human population. If either of them legalizes Bitcoin, it will mean that the percentage of people using Bitcoin would have grown by a significant number.  The will also be a big motivation for other countries to consider doing same because these two countries are big economies.

The price of Bitcoin will definitely surge when any of these countries decide to legalize Bitcoin due to the pressure of demand.

I'm not too concerned about countries making Bitcoin their legal tender, I don't think that Bitcoin is meant to be in control of any centralized authority, it is meant to be in the control of individuals and perhaps institutions. If the adoption of Bitcoin will increase to the extent that everybody is making use of it as an alternative currency for p2p transactions, that will be better for me. It will be a boost no doubt if big countries like China and India, were to adopt Bitcoin as a legal tender, although I don't see it happening, it'll boost Bitcoin adoption and it's price will surely increase. But I am more concerned for the whole countries in the world to be Bitcoin friendly, not having any restrictions for it's transactions.

I think this topic have been up for discussions lately and a lot of interests are geared towards this. Generally, the acceptance of Bitcoin by the China and Indian government will make a huge difference in the value and position of Bitcoin and other top cryptocurrencies in the world as both countries have the facilities to boost the use of the technology within their states and also have the population to rally around the currency. But I guess both China and India are being careful about this decision.

One thing I'm also sure of is that both countries, especially China will yet want to have put in place all the necessary management and monitoring tools to the activities of Bitcoin within the country. For security reasons, the countries may like to have a complete account of transactions going in and out of the country's border. This can be a single reason among others that could have discouraged their by-in.

Both countries are against the cryptos in different way, we all know China banned cryptos multiple times and currently they banned miners also their governance system is controlled so they don't want a decentralised monetary system to be used as a legal tender meanwhile they are pushing their CBDC digital Yuan among their people.

On the other, India tried the banning in 2018 if I am not wrong later they come up with high taxation of 30% for crypto gains which simply shows that they are discouraging people from using it.

It will positively affect bitcoin price (not other coins though) but that effect is not going to be as high as you are thinking because for the price to soar we still need adoption to take place and it is not like people are just going to jump on board and start buying bitcoin just because the government accepted bitcoin as legal tender.

Look at El Salvador for example. They adopted bitcoin as legal tender and the adoption grew but it is still a small percentage and it is not like all 6.3 million El Salvadorians have bought bitcoin just because of it being legal tender!
Bitcoin is still volatile and many still view it as a risky investment. Not to mention that it doesn't stop the FUD from scaring them into not-buying.

Literally, nothing will happen for sure. Do you expect that adoption in China and India would drive a Bitcoin price surge? Their populations and economies are huge. They have very high GDP, but this is due to the large population in their countries.

Countries like China and India see BTC as a Trojan horse. It could disrupt their economies. They fear Bitcoin would drive money out of their control. It would destroy their power from within. So, they won't adopt it.

Even if 5-10% population of those two countries start using Bitcoin for their day to day payments then even that would increase the fees of Bitcoin to very high levels. We have seen high network congestion during the halving time and if number of transactions increase on daily basis then there's chance to see very high level of network congestion unless some layer 2 solution is used.

Of course, this is a big dream for all Bitcoin lovers, to be adopted by the two largest countries in the world in terms of population, this will be a happy victory day for Bitcoin.

The price will certainly rise at least 10 times due to the huge demand that will occur for Bitcoin and almost everyone will try to keep the Bitcoins they own, so the demand will increase greatly and there will be a huge shortage in supply, which will lead to a significant increase in the price.

At the moment, it is difficult to imagine such a scenario, but it is a dream that may happen in the distant future.

You are right, governments accepting bitcoin as a currency does not mean they will get rid of their national currencies, both can coexist. But the question is why should they accept a currency they do not control?

Legalizing a decentralized currency would not benefit the government and would even harm the economy. Since it is difficult for the government to control and balance the economy, I think that is why so far not many countries have legalized bitcoin as a currency.

Honestly, I know people really want and expect bitcoin to be legalized as a currency because people will be free to use it. But if we put ourselves in the shoes of the government, we will see that there is no benefit in using bitcoin as a currency. Governments need to protect their interests, so I don't think bitcoin has a chance of becoming a legal currency in many countries or the world.

As it was said, not all would be using BTC to pay for anything, however, it would spike up the fees greatly, in my opinion.
And affect the chain in many ways, positive at that, I would say.

That's going to be helpful for the people of those countries as they will be allowed to send and receive payments with Bitcoin and that might impact the value of Bitcoin in good way. But, there's chance that making it a legal tender in such populated nations Bitcoin might see huge number of transactions on daily basis and thus there's chance to see way higher levels of network congestion then and fee might get higher.

Well considering the population density in both China abd India if this was to happen there will be a crazy surge in the price of Bitcoin it may also have some other effects like increase in the volatility of the Bitcoin market
But this is basically hypothetically speaking because for tye mean time I don't see it happening hopefully in the nearest future the government will have a second thought about bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies

I don't think this is possible.

Bitcoin promotion will definitely surge high, and its price will skyrocket once again. But price fluctuations will always be there, as there will always be pump and dump no matter how positive the market is.

However, the probability rate for this to happen is too slim. Note that these countries are not bitcoin friendly and would definitely go against bitcoin as long as they can. But changes are sometimes inevitable. They could take a different path in the future, most probably when other big countries are already into bitcoin as well.

It will increase the relevance of bitcoin as a currency. If a country like China chooses to accept Bitcoin as a legal tender considering that China is one of the countries that many other countries depend on to import some of the products they produce there. If Bitcoin becomes a legal tender it means that buyers from all around the world will be able to pay Chinese manufacturers with Bitcoin. That will be fulfilling the function of Bitcoin as a currency making international trade easier.

Can something like this happen? I say time will tell.

Using bitcoin as a legal tender doesn’t mean it will be the main means of payment because this two countries can never have anything other than their own currency as such it will be used as an alternative currency to their traditional currency. So even if they legalize it today that simply doesn’t translate to its usage by the citizens, the over 1 billion citizen won’t be making daily transactions on bitcoin like you put it out, as there are going to be those who will but even use it, those that will use it will actually limit its usage to transactions that favours them in terms of fees to be paid like cross boarder transactions.

Its impact is simple any adoption growth leads to demand and in turn demand leads to increase in price. So onboarding close 3 billion people is definitely a bullish news that will pump the market

It will create a temporary rise to the price of Bitcoin. That's the impact.
Since most of the altcoins follow Bitcoin's price movement, there's a chance that they might increase as well, but not as much as Bitcoin.

After that, it will be back to normal. Do you expect that Bitcoin becoming a legal tender to these 2 countries have a long-term effect towards the price? I don't think so, and TBH, I don't see this ever happens as well. I mean China has banned Bitcoin at first place, and until now, there's no sign that they're unbanning it. Well, if for some reasons this will happen, I don't also think that there will be an increase in daily transactions as well because I believe people would rather hold their Bitcoins rather than using it to pay something especially now.

I guess let's just not expect for this to happen.

I don’t think they will do that. Both rupee and cny are in pretty good shape. These countries ain’t no like El Salvador which has weak national currency. It made sense fir El Salvador to make btc legal tender but it serves no purpose for both India and China. I only expect China to remove the bitcoin ban and that would be more than enough. We don’t need the involvement of the governments. Actually ignoring crypto is the best thing a government can do for us. Whenever they get involved, they create more trouble for us than doing any good.

Simply, it'd impact to the surge of bitcoin price and expanding the ecosystem of bitcoin blockchain.

Although I don't think this can happen most especially with china but all the same since we are assuming, I think the changes will be definitely be massive in terms of pump of the price cause first the two nations are among the biggest and also their economic strength is also big and imagine a case when all the companies and firms starting acquiring Bitcoin and also citizen are allowed freely to trade Bitcoin, it would definitely impact crypto market although can't say same the economical strength of the nation.

Even in El Salvador with their humble 6 million people they recurred to Lightning for mass adoption via the Chivo wallet when they introduced Bitcoin as legal tender. I'm sure if a bigger country even thinks about designating Bitcoin a legal tender, they would either first investigate the layer-2 landscape, or develop an own layer-2. And they could also offer a completely centralized Bitcoin sidechain, copying Blockstream's Liquid model but with institutions of the state as members of the sidechain federation.

Of course even Lightning needs some time for "onboarding". But sidechains don't have that problem. And the current sidechain landscape evolves quite well, and even if most have still centralized elements, projects like tBTC (Threshold Network), Nomic and (upcoming) Stacks are already "as decentralized as most altcoins". And there's also BitVM which can make sidechain creation even more decentralized in the future (but it needs some time).

So I don't consider the scenario impossible for technical reasons. Of course, politically it is very, very unlikely from today's point of view. However: If there's a "Bitcoin adoption race" e.g. if more countries adopt explicitly Bitcoin-friendly policies and their citizens begin to benefit from price increases, then it may not be completely impossible, above all for India.

If there is such decision taken by the governments of India and China that they will accept Bitcoin as legal tender in their countries, there will undoubtedly be a major boom in the Bitcoin price and cryptocurrency markets as well as the adoption of Bitcoin will continue to grow exponentially and it is more likely to happen because we know that India and China are the most populous countries in the world.

According to a 2022 UN report, China's population was 1.426 billion while India's population was 1.412 billion at that time.


When Bitcoin is legalized as legal tender in these two countries, the number of investors will increase exponentially, which will also increase the price of Bitcoin significantly. Moreover, institutionally investors will be encouraged to buy Bitcoins which will be able to increase the value of Bitcoins significantly. Not only that, when India China legalizes Bitcoin, other countries will also start investing in Bitcoin and the same time Global trust will be created.

When India and China legalize it, they will also announce their country's full support for miners. As a result, the amount of investment will increase as miners express interest. That means  positive impact will be created for bitcoin from all aspects. It will have a positive impact on the entire world.

It is technically impossible to make Bitcoin the main means of payment in a country with a population of over 1 billion people. As far as I remember, the Bitcoin architecture allows for no more than 400,000 transactions per day. This limitation simply does not allow Bitcoin to be made an official means of payment in China or India.

In addition, what about runes and ordinals, which can unexpectedly increase transaction fees not even several times, but by orders of magnitude?

China and India are interested in protecting their national currencies, and they are also planning to introduce CBDC.

Bitcoin may become an integral part of the gold and foreign exchange reserves of these countries, but it is unlikely to become an official means of payment in India and China (in my opinion, this is an unlikely event).

That's the most populated countries on this planet, which will make Bitcoin being used by almost 3 Billion people out of eight billion. This will make Bitcoin more scar and prices should go up by 10x minimum. But I am sure, this is not going to happen until this gets executed in United States / Canada etc. China and India usually follows USA. And India is very against Crypto, so not gonna happen at all.

These countries have the largest population so they really could boost the growth of a bull market. China alone could make their millionaires jump in to save their money from being confiscated by President Xi.

However, they are both member of the BRICS who already declared to have their own currency. They will most likely not see BTC as legal tender. The US has more chances of turning BTC into legal tender unless they go back to the gold standard which I doubt they would.

The same thing that happened in El Salvador and on the Steam platform will occur: people will try it once and never use it again due to high fees and slow transactions.

Until the scalability problem is solved, it only demonstrates how unusable it is.

These two countries already know that it will be a blow on bitcoin, if they make it a legal tender and that will give them less power to control their citizens, especially China who the president is a communist that wants all of them to be under his surveillance. Bitcoin is not from the government and they will not adopt it, because they hate the decentralized nature of bitcoin since it cannot be controlled by them.

For now, that's very unlikely to happen. They might legalize bitcoin but it would be highly impossible to adopt bitcoin as a legal tender. They surely would prefer to launch their own digital currency instead and make it as a legal tender rather than resorting into bitcoin, and yet they won't take full control with people's bitcoin.

So even if adopting bitcoin as a legal tender would bring a lot of positive effects on bitcoin and its community, but it won't be enough to convince these countries to shift into bitcoin as their legal tender.

Why did you choose these 2 countries? Because they have the largest population in the world and you think that will drive bitcoin price better?

But as far as I know these are two countries that are not very friendly to bitcoin. So far, China has maintained a ban on the entire cryptocurrency industry, not just bitcoin and they have no intention of lifting the ban in the near future. Meanwhile, although India has legalized cryptocurrencies but they still apply quite high taxes to this industry, making investors feel uncomfortable. So I don't think there's any scenario where they accept bitcoin as legal currency.
Not to mention both countries have their own currencies and things are going so well they wouldn't need a decentralized currency like bitcoin.

This is very obvious that if China and India declares Bitcoin as a legal tender I think Bitcoin's price will blow up because of the fact that these countrues has huge populations and could be having huge amount of investments in crypto especially Bitcoin and from that I think there will be an insane price surge.

As far as I can think of, an announcement by India or China that Bitcoin is legal tender could result in a temporary but very significant price surge due to their economies' and populations' sizes. However, as far as I know, India still sees Bitcoin with much skepticism and has loaded heavy taxes on it, while China has on several occasions straight-out banned crypto transactions. Thus, their current regulatory positions, while sounding exciting, would indicate that it isn't likely to happen anytime soon, and even if it did, the overall global impact might not be quite as huge as might be anticipated.

China is the second largest economy in the world, while India is the fifth. These nations have a higher GDP than El Salvador, so I predict that the price of Bitcoin will increase. However, the impact will be higher if it is the US that adopts Bitcoin as a legal tender because the US economy is bigger than the combination of both China and India. However, there is no significant level of chance that these nations will ever make such a law.  

Expect to see the pump and dump if that happens. It has already proven and tested before, even fake news, Bitcoin price is always reacting but sometimes it will go back immediately.
With this big countries, India and China, it will create big impact, that is what I can see right now to happen first.

Take a wild gues what would happen if two most populous countries in the world (together they make more than 1/3 of world population) decide to make bitcoin a legal tender?

Since no way in hell that happens, imho no point in daydreaming.

China and India are big countries, if they really make bitcoin legal tender in their country it will have a significant impact on the price of Bitcoin and other crypto, since making Bitcoin legal tender means legalizing Bitcoin to be used not only for payments but more than that, and it will increase the market demand for Bitcoin.
But is that really happening? I don't think so, because making Bitcoin legal tender is quite complex in a country as big as China and India. And especially they are protective of their economy, so legalizing Bitcoin as legal tender in their country is just a dream, because it will never happen.

What if India or China declares bitcoin as legal tender in the country ?  What impact will it have on the bitcoin prices and other crypto coins ?