Bitcoin Forum

The "Demonitization" attempt to flush out undeclared wealth, has failed according to this article :

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-41100610

The subsequent result of this was actually catastrophic for India's economy. A lot of people lost their jobs and the real estate sector look some huge knocks.

In a proper regulated "Bitcoin" environment, people will find it difficult to hide their wealth. Yes, it is a problem in the unregulated environment, but it will be easier to monitor it within a regulated environment.

~~ What would your solution be, if you were confronted with this problem?
~~ Can Bitcoin regulation help to solve this problem?
~~ Should Bitcoin support governments in monitoring wealth and honesty in tax reporting?
~~ What will happen if Bitcoin is used to circumvent measures to hide wealth?
~~ Will full transparency destroy financial transparency?

Share your thoughts on this matter please. I am curious to see how honest Bitcoin users can be with their views on this.

Seems like a "proper regulated" environment would involve banning mixers, having extremely deep KYC procedures in all exchanges including LocalBitcoins, and banning transfers into more anonymous coins like Monero.  Basically it would just remove all privacy that people ever had while using BTC.  Personally I don't think that's acceptable.
It should help citizens monitor wealth and honesty in the banking system.  For tax reporting it's not really as good as digital fiat money.
People will try their best to find a more anonymous system. Right now they have cash, without cash they would use BTC or an anonymous crypto, without BTC they would find something else or perhaps use a valuable item like gold.

The situation in many countries of the world. The modern economy is built so that all poor countries facing poverty pay for the well-being of rich countries. Bitcoin can help individuals, but the economy he will not be able to recover.

Please don`t put the words "regulated" and "bitcoin" in one sentence.It`s horrible. ;D
I don`t know what exactly are you trying yo say with "regulated Bitcoin environment".What is this?
The whole consept of bitcoin and cryptos is to create a "regulaiton free" environment,away from governments and banks.There are easier methods to find and catch people who are hiding their wealth.
Demonitization is not one of them.The Indian government should increase VAT and decrease all the other taxes.

I don't think it would help. What we keep in our bitcoin wallets are none of the government's concern. That's what bitcoin is at its core - monetary freedom.

I think the Indian government would find bitcoin even more suspect since they can't easily view the contents and the people may try mixing coins anyway.


I agree with this sir, they should just find other ways of getting taxes. Does India already have a VAT? In my country it's currently at 12%, I don't think anything higher than that would benefit anyone.

So what is your offer? You want government to make people register their BTC adresses or give everyone just 1 adress and ban people from using the other adresses (like making the "national" wallet)? Anyway those regulations will be easily avoidable.

All these just show that it would be foolish to start trusting the government fully. Bitcoin traded at a premium in India during the demonetization drive and that premium has lasted till today.

I also hate regulation, just look back at what damage BitLicence brought to the businesses in New York. The thing is, we either change the governments with our vote or we adapt to the government regulation that are forced onto you. The government will not just sit idle and relinquish control to a unregulated currency that is in direct competition with their local reserve currency.

We should find ways to work with them or to replace them with Bitcoin-friendly governance. < at the next elections >

It might be true. At present, you can say this thing that Bitcoin cannot play its role in making an economy of a country stable. But you can always hope for the best. Things won’t remain the same always and you can expect Bitcoin helping countries to make their economy stable.

Many government really don't see bitcoin as a future of money because they are not well informed about it or they have not taking a time to study it to know more about it. They are just seeing bitcoin as an enemy I think because it is not tangible and the possibility of security measures can be a threat to them.

Bitcoin is a currency of all countries in the world and it serves as a medium for any kind of race, because when there is a job that is payable by bitcoin anyone in the whole world can participate to join it.

I don't think there is a correlation between the bitcoin and the demonetizatiom of money. In India the government make several plans to bring out the black money, but the same is not possible as majority of the black money holders were the one who moves the government accordingly.

The main agenda of demonetization was to flush out black money, stop the circulation of fake currency notes and thus prevent corruption to an extent, but like you said half of the Indian government is corrupt so in this case it was a failure.

The other purpose of demonetization was to digitalize India, digitalization through demonetization and in this sense demonetization was somewhat a success. People started using digital payment systems. So bitcoin is somewhat correlated with demonetization.


Direct regulation of bitcoin isn't possible, taxable to an extent, KYC/AML. Fiat is still better to hide wealth. Bitcoin is the most transparent payment system, everything is publicly available. If the majority of the population of any country starts using bitcoin more than any other mode of payment then I think it is possible to solve the issue of corruption in that country. For something like that to happen Bitcoin would have to go through numerous regulations including consumer protection laws for bitcoin users. Is something like this is possible with a decentralized currency?

There is no positive signs from the governments in order to regulate the bitcoins in India. In fact the member of ruling party has declared the bitcoins as ponzi scheme in the parliment, which is a LOL statement by the MP Kirit Somaiyya. We wish that he should educate himself and clear the doubts about the bitcoins.

Flushing out "black money" was never going to be easy or a simple process completed in a few steps, it is going to take a concerted effort over a long time. Using something like the blockchain would be a great way for any country to monitor transactions but would not necessarily be good for the people using it. I think India have recently replaced the 500 and 1,000 rupee notes recently - then will continue on to the smaller denominations. This did work very well at the time, even if it caused problems for ordinary people, as a lot of people realized their hidden money would become worthless without trading it in.

Bitcoin is transparent?let be real if half of country start using bitcoin then there will be two change either GDP will pump to greater extent or dump in similar manner.we have understand india is a developing country and still literacy level is low and thanks to our corrupt environment ,middle man family suffer.and demonetisation was still effective move done after decades ,yes it failed but we have to understand politicians have hidden their money in foreign banks so it will not affect them that much and if bitcoin was adopted in early goverment then there would be no trace of black money.

Ok, but what would happen if the people who want to hide their wealth start using the anonymous cryptocurrencies like XMR, ZEC and DASH? Maybe its time to accept that this is a whole new world out there with full of disruption.

The article labels it demonetization.

It might be more accurate to say central banks in india are waging a war against cash/paper money by placing restrictions on their use and destroying wealth denominated in fiat, to encourage people to embrace electronic money which central banks have complete control/monopoly over.

Placing arbitrary restrictions on the usage of cash restricts innovation & economic growth, it reduces the efficiency with which people are able to buy/sell/invest and otherwise decreases standard of living. If the goal is to strengthen the economy and raise standard of living a better goal may be to empower people to have more freedom and more options in the way they use their wealth rather than imposing harsher rules and regulations which tend to cripple growth.

Well, I live in India and I can really confirm that all this demonetization did was to harass people to stand in huge queues out in the sun, there was absolutely zero work done by this, and that I say in respect to eliminating black money.
I really think mass adoption of crypto-currencies like bitcoins should be done, just so that people can escape these kind of situations, and have their freedom with their own money. Also, Bitcoin uses a sophisticated technique to verify coins and transactions so there would be absolutely zero cases of fraudalent coins, unlike with fiat, where people are generating loads of fake notes.

LOL.. I still remember those days. The exchange rate of Bitcoin in India was at least 20% to 30% higher than the international exchange rate. There was so much demand, even in my town (which is in a quite remote location). People were running scared, and they were ready to do anything to convert their fiat Indian currency to an asset.

It seems to be impossible to plant something like that. There won't be any regulation which means people can easily forfeit the rules of using single wallet address. Why would they use it single address if the rest of world is open to use multiple address and multiple wallets too. That can't be controlled and it would be against decentralised rule of bitcoin. There is no way to track the transaction of bitcoin with so much population in India country. Plus there lacks the complete IT structure in the india and many of the counties in it are unaware of computing. That would be really difficult to implement all of this.

That would be very unreliable way to perform the demonitization in the country like India. Half of the population (or more) doesn't even know what the difference between fiat currency and an asset over the Internet. They wouldn't believe such ways of putting their money and they will never do it even the government say so. They have already done so many attempts to make it corrupt free country but people will always find the ways to do the same. Black money is black and no matter what you do it will always find its way even in the best digital system implementing into India. That's the way government and politician work in there. No offence but there needs complete revolution in the political system as well as the way government works. Why would one go changing people and traditional ways of banking.

I think there will be hardly any Government which will keep its people out of the things which are helping them. Bitcoin is no less than a miracle changing the lives of people. It will take time and all the things will be in favor of Investors and users. There is hardly anything to worry about Government.

Government, presently they are upto digitizing India fully. So Bitcoin will surely be a great option as both currency and investment.
But it will surely take time, as most people are unknown to this, and also ignorant who knows about it. Regulations if induced with BTC, it might cripple some key features.

I still think this is caused by recent calls to illegalize cash & paper money.

Methods to restrict and destroy the value of paper money are intended to herd people towards embracing electronic payment & exchange.

This may be similar to gold/silver being banned in buying/selling roles for merchandise/services by governments in past eras to force them to embrace paper money & cash.

the use with the occupation of blockchain system helps as the wider on chance as the details of arrange on following terms with the framework for the design tempate, as more with the empoyment to gains with returns of utilization as managing the ideal customs of work as the offers from the crypto finance developer with the deliverance of offers to public audience.

No mate, Indian government had executed the demonitization process to bring out the black money in the mainstream economy which was hided many people. If we look at the motive of the government then bitcoin could not fulfill it, which was to know the owner of the unaccounted wealth.

I don't think that going into decentralised mode will make it any easier to find the solution to Indian economy problems. I believe it will become worse and the India is not in the position to accept the virtual currency like bitcoin. That is just not possible because India is far far away from the digitalisation completely. The country where poor people are more than richer one, or the country where illiteracy rate is more than literate one then how could they possibly accept the banking system which would be decentralised.