Well, if whole governments start getting on the FOMO bandwagon then a lot of people here would be very happy campers for all the days to come. Still, I feel that the first country to set the ball rolling is the tough part. I am probably not understanding your line of thought but the adoption of bitcoin as a inter bank clearing mechanism will itself need adoption by everybody else first, right?
 
Most developing countries have very conservative central banks and regulation. That is the perspective I am familiar with and I don't see it happening there. For major, high-volume economies like US, Japan; this is too much of a risk. What we can expect is for the smaller, more agile countries taking the lead. The tax-haven and financial services variety like Liechtenstein, Malta, probably Mauritius. As these tiny countries kickstart some sort of adoption, there maybe the FOMO you mentioned will come into play.

Got to get re-acquainted with the news of regulatory authorities in Korea, Japan etc. There was a thread started by Hydrogen i guess to keep a tab of the number of countries favorable and non-favorable to bitcoin.

Elli, I appreciate that you are a newbie at the Indian forum and actively trying to engage by opening topics left, right and center. The enthusiasm would be well served if you would also start the discussion with some well-thought out views of your own rather than simply raising a question to start a topic. This is typically seen as a gimmick to boost your post count.
There are a lot of relevant things about cryptocurrencies and bitcoin that you can share and discuss within the Indian context. For example, with the decline of bank transfers, what has been your major source to sell/ buy bitcoin. What do you think about the future of BTC/ Crypto in India if the regulatory framework doesn't get clarified.

There is so much political drama to cover while talking about the sheer incompetence our authorities are displaying. It could all be a worthy discussion.

An open ended question asking for "views on ups and downs" is well, far too generalized to express anything. You as a newcomer, lets hear what are your views?

Good initiative if all the video tutorials are in hindi.

I didn't check them myself because it is asking to login with a google account. A good starting point would be to ass an SSL certificate. In today's days of ICO scams, people are a bit wary of non-https: websites.
It makes a perception difference and makes one feel confident to give it a go. Good Luck for this. Hope this helps in adoption and spreading the knowledge.

Excited to see the crypto avatar of "I am an African prince and need to move my money".

Nigerian prince jokes aside, lot of politicians have taken to promises of blockchain in developing countries. Countries like Nigeria have a young, tech-savvy population comfortable with smartphones, apps, coding, web development and have access to the latest generation, high speed networks. There are also several problems that need entrepreneurs for solutions at the local level.

ICO based Bitcoin-funding helping these entrepreneurs to raise enough money and run profitable businesses while solving the problems their governments won't, was the original vision that excited me when i first heard of ICOs. Well, I was naive to ignore that people prefer scamming than solving problems  but well, with regulation, I think there is still hope.

Those people are some of the last tribal populations with no interaction with the outside world. The British wiped plenty of those you call "savages and natives" when they first decided to build a prison there. After independence, the Indian Govt decided to not interfere. There is nothing analogous to the "White man's burden" in Eastern philosophy. They are to be left alone.

The main problem in this whole drama was the laxity of enforcing its own laws by the Indian Govt. That guy was on a suicide mission trying to sneak in and dodged boat patrols on his way. If he would have been caught, this would never have happened.

The threat to populations without immunity from modern-world diseases catching it from illegal outsiders is very real. It is not an exaggeration. Remember the smallpox blankets?

This is going to be tricky. Governments need compliance and regulation to exercise control and power. Recognizing bitcoin to this extent means loosening of that power over its own citizens. The biggest worry for developing countries at least is the implications on money laundering. As far as developed countries are concerned, their too the governments don't stand to gain anything by legitimizing bitcoin.

Japan and Korea seemed to be very accepting of Bitcoin, till the hacking drama with exchanges and involvement of officials. Now we have the regulators jumping in. The problem for the governments is recognizing its importance.

As much as we'd like this to happen, I doubt this is gonna happen in the near future. Then again, wouldn't people like the twins and entities like coinbase become too strong in their own right?  How would the lawmakers come to term with that?

For bitcoin to become "antiquated", another cryptocurrency needs to come up with better fundamentals. The fundamentals of Bitcoin are:
1. A solid, constantly evolving codebase and team.
2. Proof of Work.

It can be argued that over time, Proof of Work has created mining centralization. The biggest mining equipment manufacturers, miners as well as cheap providers of Hydroelectricity are in China. Even then, the economic incentive for honest mining is too high for miners to go against their self-interest. In a way, any system can be gamed. What is clear from evidence is that PoW is the one which is hardest/ costliest to game, especially when established with a network effect of Bitcoin's scale. Can someone come up with a better consensus mechanism? Or is there a better one? Hard to say for future but looking at how Nano and IOTA have devolved, it can be said safely that PoW is not getting trumped anytime soon.

The other most important thing is the entities behind the codebase. It is often argued that the reference implementation is too guarded and rights are concentrated within an elite circle. But then, every other alternate cryptocurrency will have a team behind it. Can those teams be trusted more than the group behind Bitcoin who have established their reputation through timely interventions and commitments over the past 10 years? In my opinion, any other cryptocurrency will find it hard, nearly impossible to create such a trusted team and open-source codebase. (Something with which individuals and institutions can trust their fiat billions).

As long as these factors remain, there is hardly any chance for another cryptocurrency to take away the crown of being the most dependent and usable digital currency. In terms of alternate blockchain uses, well that is a completely different market. Those areas are still open waiting for their own crown-bearers.

The drop in price wasn't that closely related to the banning of advertisements. The BTC correction was mostly attributed to the Futures trading I think. By then ICOs had already shown themselves to be non-reliable with multiple exit scams. The ICO craze also brought about the "securities" question in the spotlight and led to the SEC entering the game.

Then again, the bust of BTC prices has way more things behind them from Tether issuance being used to prop up the price to Multi-million dollar hacks of exchanges. I don't think the ICOs played much of a role in that. What they did ensure was the slow bleed from the 7-8K mark. A majority of these ICOs were in ETH. It has been going down since the ICOs started cashing out.

Sure there are legitimate ICOs but the whole ecosystem had no time to build up self-regulation. The scammers were quick to take advantage of that. Even today, like you say, if the price booms, we will probably have another shit-ton of ICOs and shitty managers will climb onto the bandwagon of managing bounties, albeit with their "disclaimers" now..

ICOs are a typical example of people spoiling a good thing through greed. When the craze started, it was hailed in the US and other western countries as the Little guys chance to get rich. It was celebrated as a way by which anybody having BTC or ETH could be a part of investing in startups. The ICOs like Tezos, Bancor broke records and raised millions of USD in BTC/ ETH.

At the chance of sounding regionalistic/ racist, I must say, this is when the netherworlds of Internet took notice. Russia, Eastern Europe, Thailand, Phillipines, India etc. all had a lot of tech savvy youngsters good at 'copying' stuff and making it look snazzy. So they copied the typical website template. Whitepaper, Crazy techno-babble about vaporware and buzzwords like decentralize, Permissionless, Blockchain, AI, Machine Learning, etc etc. The most important part was the Team and Advisors..

10 people dressed in suits to appear as the CEO, CFO types and 10 people with curly long hair and beards to appear as the crazy programmer type (Tech Lead, CTO etc etc).  Man this shit would be hilarious as hell if it hadn't made people bleed so much money. Hell, its hilarious even now because all sort of greedy idiots fell for them.

During the 2017 bull run, the clogged transactions on BTC and ETH were a result of people trying to get the earliest tokens as soon as "Pre-Sale" started. These people then simply disappeared. It was all assisted by bounties by irresponsible managers here at Bitcointalk. Fake facebook and twitter accounts with 5000 followers for highest stakes, rows upon rows of excel sheets. People putting others articles in their own name for stakes. It was crazy as hell for anyone who wanted to believe in the initial euphoria and promise. I was personally disappointed and disgusted by seeing the levels to which people would fall to scam others.

This is when the racist comments about "third-world pajeets" became the trend and frankly, I could never fault them for being that angry and disgusted. Now it looks like a bunch of those ICOs dumped their ETH and BTC onto exchanges to secure their ill-gotten gains as soon as possible.

I just hope enough people have learnt their lessons.

Agree that the Indian section needs an active moderator. I'd like to know what kind of commitment it'll take to be a moderator. Does it mean spending hours upon hours on the forum? I'll definitely ask around.
As far as the scams are concerned, the space is still growing. I also think that Indians are a little harder to fool owing to our jugaad mentality and the constant mental acrobatics we have to perform to wade through our normal civilian lives.

One really sad thing i have noticed is that Indians who know something love to use their newfound knowledge to scam others rather than help others grow. Yet, in this bear market, we can hope for a revival of some real work ethic. A lot of young people are trustworthy and idealistic and hope they can gather around to change things. Let us hope we can change things for the better out here.

The extended points added by OP, although already discussed to death here at the forum, merit some discussion.

He is mostly concerned about how to Get Bitcoin. First thing you have to do is to free yourself from the bias against early adopters. You cannot expect to mine a few hundred BTC like it's still 2011. Assess the present situation and you have folllowing options:

1.Mining:
For anybody interested in getting Bitcoin, getting into mining might be a good time now with hash rates falling a bit. BTC mining per se is difficult business. Though you can look at mining ETH or some Alts using GPUs. It isn't as big an investment and it is also a safer option because of the resell value on GPUs.
Remember that if you really want crypto to survive and believe in it, the present electricity costs will be your investment which you can easily recover when we get into the bull phase.

2.Research::
There are a plethora of startups trying to use blockchain in every aspect from databases, finance, gaming to cloud computing. The space is filled with shit ICOs and bounties so a good research is your only way to separate wheat from chaff. If you are an individual with an alternate income source, you can easily devote sometime to research and all. If you are looking to earn peanuts and pocket change through incessant facebook shares and meaningless tweets, then it is no use discussing these nuances in the first place.

For a normal individual who isn't a blockchain programmer, these two are the only options i can see where you will not have the risk to burn your hands and will actually learn something, as well as contribute to the whole space.
Good Luck!

Sorry for replying here Bill but What in gods name is up with that avatar??!!  I read a lot here and always thought of you as someone reliable and mature with those cool and balanced responses. Going to have a hard time fitting that persona with the F***ing IT monster!!

Another one of those guys who has found a way to earn by creating "web traffic" for recently launched ICOs and "products", half of which are fake themselves.


Those of you who have been to telegram groups will have noticed these people coming in with the message "I have great way to collaborate, if any admin then PM me". This is the stupid stuff they do.

They create fake traffic by paying worthless pennies to people for repeated comments, upvotes etc. This system of paid traffic was screwing up internet but it has never been as bad as now. Earlier, you at least had to go through institutions to route money to people and had to have a verifiable address. Now these people can simply pay worthless "tokens" to newbies who are gullible enough to think they are holding something valuable.

Please people, stop wasting time with such things.

Instead, use your time to actually research on projects that you understand and invest in them what you can afford. Such crowd-sourcing of effort to create fake traffic, fake comments and fake upvotes has been the bane of ICOs and crypto for too long. Please stop!


If anybody has any doubt that these people are fake and just using bots even here at Bitcointalk to push up the facade of a real discussion, just look at the series of fake and same comments on both these topics here:

1. Comments on the topic : Crowdholding feedback bounty: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5070216.msg47953489#msg47953489
2. Comments on this thread : https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4591551.msg47955466#msg47955466

I think if this was the reason you fell in love with bitcoin then that reason still exists. It is still peer to peer electronic cash. Instead, If you fell in love during the 2017 bull run then these feelings maybe withdrawal symptoms from the recent <4K breakup. Lately, many of the 2017 newbies are feeling this way. Don't worry.

That again depends on you. Majority of the people in developing countries just don't have the kind of access to a developed p2p market to enable them to spend bitcoin. So they hold in the hope that all these rich westerners will again go crazy buying stuff in their free market and push the price up..
If you are in a country that allows you to use BTC for financial transactions, start a service with it. Sell stuff for BTC. You could easily do a lot if the conditions are right.

You cannot fault the people who started in 2017 by comparing their reaction with someone who "stumbled upon" BTC and found some in old hard drives and computers to suddenly become rich. Of course those people wouldn't complain. This doesn't change the fact that bitcoin was promoted as a "get rich quick" scheme. We were sold on the idea of a truly decentralized currency. This may yet happen but it is not something that most people will see in their lifetimes. People who support BTC for this reason alone won't worry about the price. But they also wouldn't support the "market price" by buying 1000s of BTC at today's prices. No serious investor will bet that much on ideals.

Ultimately, the price support is still from the people who got their BTC dirt-cheap and are holding because they will stay in profit even if it goes <1000. There is nothing great about being a hodler. That is what the newcomers need to realize. We must not project our experiences onto theirs. You cannot be a hodler cuz you don't have enough to hoard.



And these bad credit scores went into the pockets of the smart hodlers/ traders that cashed out. Although nobody can be held responsible except people's own greed, I do think that we all (2017 people) made the mistake of being overly idealistic. I am totally for organic growth and it will come only when regulation has had its run AND we start seeing some real products and users. Till then, the "price" is at the mercy of those who mined thousands of BTC when it was under a dollar.

Well, i plead guilty on both counts.(Single PM and re-applying). Yet i find it hard to understand the abhorrence to being called by the first name. We all call each other by those names here. Personally, (and hopefully, few others), I find calling someone"Manager" quite impersonal. The offence given in this case is inadvertent. Different styles i guess.

FTFY (or so I hope)

AAbout rejected applications and re-applying, the BTC paying sig-campaigns are fewer and far between these days. So It'd be very helfpul if you write "All others rejected" after going through a bunch of applications. It happened a while back that i got missed and the manager later clarified in PM that "Apply again, i'll accept".

So this does happen. People sometime try to be cautious as a few people above (including myself) were being. A few managers do the "all others rejected" thing and it clarifies the issue right there.

Thanks for hearing out.

Once again some serious competition for the remaining 3 Sr. Member slots..!! There aren't enough good sig campaigns to go around for the kind of Senior Members the merit system has produced..  . Quoting my application to obviate the possibility of going unseen.

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The possible ban on cryptocurrency will be an enormously regressive step if implemented. But the statue you speak of is an attempt towards consolidating a conservative, right-wing identity. There has been a revival of right-wing politics around the world. India was moving on that path before Trump was elected.
The problem is that while the present Govt. earned people's confidence by campaigning on an anti-corruption and development plank, they have shown provocative rhetoric despite India being a very diverse country.

The cryptocurrency ban is a result of the cases of fraudulent activites by the, dare i say, early adopters. In India, and most countries with a colonial past, we have this explotation syndrome where people want to take advantage of those with lesser knowledge/ power than them.
There were cases of Ponzi schemes, extortion, people buying bitcoin with black money during demonetization etc etc. Its not a surprise that the Govt views it as a thorn in its side.

Its not really as simple as that. Maybe the very few who actually got in at the beginning would be willing to go to the extent of resettlement in another country but it is not an option for everyone. It can still be a source for Indians to get paid for providing online services depending on what the govt. thinks about the taxation aspect. Depending on DTAA's, this could remain a possible use-case.


Rightly said. We simply cannot see a fellow trying to sprint away from the comfortably embedded mediocrity. Successful and efficient people are seen as an affront to the norm of conforming to mediocrity. Things are changing but we still have a long way to go.

Your website seems poorly made. Simply not the work of a professional "investing" firm.

Your "investment model" asks people to transfer cryptocurrencies and then wait for you to come good on the promises. Only a foolishly naive and greedy person would be willing to trust this. The site mentions no Escrows or any other form of enforceable contracts. You claim to be linked to some investing company called kik investments AG. As proof, you only mention their address. From the looks of it, this looks extremely shady.

I wouldn't advise anyone to associate with them without better explanations and proof. The OP would be better served by answering the questions raised and not claiming shady affiliations. Also, May i know the motivation behind posting this "0.1 BTC salary" offer in the India section??