On Sun, Apr 8, 2018 at 10:59 AM, John Levine <johnl@iecc.com> wrote:

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No such jurisdiction beyond themselves.

The RBI regulates all the banks in India

Only their banks, not biz or people. Maybe their govt too, lol.

this will shut down any cryptocurrency exchanges in India

Both exchanges and citizens can still open foreign account. And local exchanges can still reasonably operate using cash or all that Indian gold, or cows, contracts, etc.

the banks, who do not want to annoy their regulator

The banks, who are in business to make money, should throw out their regulators so they can try to do that, subject to the free market. Then again, one of cryptocurrency's messages... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWAwK2fHArc

if Indians want to buy or sell cryptocurrencies, they're back to the pre-Mt.Gox situation of trying to find someone local who'll trade them for cash.

Indian markets are diverse and interconnected as any other, this is not a problem. And cryptocurrency is used in both directions.

Keep in mind that there are only about 10 million Bitcoin wallets in the world

There are 55 Million UTXO's, down from the 67M that were uneconomical to consolidate no thanks to BTC's issues. That's just for BTC, not all the other coins and tokens. Wallet estimates are harder to pinpoint. Feel free to link to some good papers on that.

and I doubt as many as a million of them are in India. There are over a billion people in India so we're talking about under 0.1% of the Indian population... a poor country, where rural phone ladies rent mobile phones

Even if that, not a bad adoption rate so far, and the guerrilla networking, love the ingenuity from necessity, ftw.

15c for a few minutes of data.

Transactions are relayed in under that time. Probably quite the deal for larger / distant transactions compared to other forms, including shipping gold and Rupees around.

Even if cryptocurrencies were a good idea, which they aren't

Unsubstantiated FUD. Sad to see on one of the lists where cryptocurrencies were born. At least cryptography is still agnostic, at least until cryptographers start taking the knee and advertising the fake backdoored crypto they can concoct as "strong crypto" to serve their masters.

India doesn't have the infrastructure to use them other than by rich people in cities.

FUD. Cities have the infrastructure, anyone in a city is at least enough to be alive there, internet cafes and p2p relations work fine and more efficiently there as well, for rich and poor.

Since the badly handled withdrawal of high value banknotes in November 2016 (I was there, same week as the US election) Indian banks have pushed hard to provide conventional electronic payments with credit and debit cards. I was impresssed how many of the stalls at markets had handheld card terminals.

Paying the mandatory extra card tax and high interest to middlemen pockets regardless of network operation costs for nothing in return that cryptocurrency can't provide for less, and freely. Unless you count the chargeback and tx censorship babysitting that keeps people and systems down from independance, and the "free money" advertising that keeps from choosing ownership. Yes they have to 'push hard' because the people smartly resist back against it....

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RBI stock price drops on news as competitors move in.

The RBI is run by the Indian government, does not issue stock, and since it is the central bank, has no competitors.

...ahh yes, yet another monopoly artificially propped up upon force of death at gunpoint, how delightful. They offer you no choice. Cryptocurrency does.

Were we saying something about fake news?

"Stock in faith" has a price too, the worldwide adoption of cryptocurrency to date says fiat [itself / systems / entities] been dropping quite a bit, both in faith and into cryptocurrency forex. Nothing fake there.