Thank you for your inputs in relation to this post. Regarding your comments, I have thought through and jotted down the below points to the best of my knowledge:

• Money laundering: While it is true that cryptocurrencies can be used easily for money laundering, it must be noted that flow of currencies from one wallet to another can be traced easily in most blockchains. Hence, the flow of money can be traced in most cases at one point or another. Irrespective of this, where a person is found to be laundering money using cryptocurrencies, they need to be tried under the Money Laundering Act, rather than banning cryptocurrencies. The governments have a wrong notion that banning cryptocurrencies would stop money laundering through cryptocurrencies. For a criminal who is rogue enough to launder money, would a simple ban on cryptocurrencies stop them from using cryptocurrencies?  
  
  Keeping this aside, what government can do is, make it compulsory to route any cryptocurrency transaction through an exchange and with mandatory reporting of the reason for the transaction in cryptocurrencies. This would help government regulate cryptocurrency in the country.
  
  
• Taxation: While tax is huge pain in the butt, as a law abiding citizen, it is necessary to pay taxes on any gain in cryptocurrency
  
  
• Trading cryptocurrencies: In this regard, as stated above government can regulate the cryptocurrency exchanges, make it mandatory to route every cryptocurrency transactions (even if it is for trading) through an exchange and instruct exchanges to collect the information for each cryptocurrency transaction. In this regard, it may be difficult to tackle Foreign exchange regulations, but with specific thresholds and frequent monitoring this could be managed as well. For eg. government could make it mandatory for exchanges to do a due diligence on a cryptocurrency before it is listed on their exchange.
  
  

I will be incorporating the above points into my original post wherever suitable. Thank you again for your valuable points.

ICICI has instructed payment gateways (intermediaries between a bank and exchange) to shut off net banking for merchants/exchange who are involved in buying or selling of cryptocurrencies directly or indirectly. With this, ICICI Bank’s online services cannot be used to deal with any cryptocurrency exchange. Sources say that this may be an implication of RBI's notification banning use of cryptocurrencies in financial and other institutions, back in 2018.

Few questions to ponder upon are as follows:

• Could other banks follow similar approach? - ICICI is one of the leading private sector bank which is one of the market leaders. It is likely that other bank may follow similar approach.
• Why is ICICI bank reacting to the notification now? or does it have anything to with the current discussion of ban on cryptocurrencies? - ICICI bank's reaction to RBI notification that came 2 years back does sound very funny. However, it is more likely that the current discussion in the parliament on ban on cryptocurrencies is leading to this reaction
• What is the way out for ICICI account holders currently who want to buy/sell crypto? - Currently these account holders will have to route this through other bank accounts.
• What if all banks follow suit with ICICI? - This is a very complicated situation. In such case, one of the options to withdraw money is to find a financial service provider/forex broker (Eg. OctaFX) outside India that accepts cryptocurrency as payments and then withdraw from such service provider/broker into a bank account. For deposit of funds into an exchange, one can use paypal, stripe, etc if supported, or use a financial service provider (like OctaFx) to route the money. Also, one can consider the option of carrying out the crypto activities through payoneer. An extreme option is to liquidate all of the crypto holdings at the earliest as soon as 4-5 banks follow suit and withdraw all of the money to a bank that hasn't banned such transactions yet, before that bank follows suit too.
• Is there a likelihood of ICICI reversing this decision? - Yes, if the government comes up with favorable regulations for crypto rather than banning all crypto, it is likely that ICICI would reverse its decision. Further, even in a scenario that the exchange owners are able to convince the banks, it could still help in resolving this issues earlier.

You can read the full news on: https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/economy/finance/lack-of-clarity-icici-shuts-out-crypto-trades/articleshow/82337734.cms

PS: Kindly do not treat the above advice as legal/financial advice and please undertake your own diligence before following any of the above steps.

Thank you for kind words and your inputs. These are my baby steps towards creating a strong legal case for cryptocurrencies and your inputs are valuable to creating this.

I would like to address a few points to the best of my ability and knowledge:

• Controlling of liquidity of the currency: Yes, governments are also concerned about controlling the flow of crypto, interest rates on the same, etc. In respect of this issue, government can address it in other means, rather than on outright ban. For example, government can regulate the use of crypto, require crypto to be maintained only with exchanges, take explicit approval of central bank for major use cases, mandatory conversion of crypto to domestic currencies where the value of such crypto exceeds certain threshold, etc. While these are rough ideas, governments could research on each option to derive an optimum solution to the issue, other than banning crypto. I would like to create a separate post for these alternatives with more detailed analysis around each option.
• Challenging a law created by Parliament/Senate: Yes, it is true that challenging a law created by Parliament/Senate could be extremely difficult. In this regard, I believe that petitioners would need to highlight before the court that the Parliament/Senate has passed the law with partial facts at hand and has not deep dived into understanding the repercussion of the Law. However, this would be very fact specific. For example, in India, the inter-ministerial committee in its report on cryptocurrencies has failed to identify various use cases and functions of crypto such as NFTs on which digital art thrives, charity such as the www.cryptorelief.in which is working towards oxygen supply during the ongoing COVID-19 crisis etc. Hence, it would be essential to highlight the ignorance of the legislature while passing the law, which would provide the court with a valid reason to provide relief in this regard. I am writing an article on this for my firm and if possible I would be sharing certain insights from the article on this forum.

I have incorporated essentials points in relation to the above into my original post now, to make it very comprehensive. Once again, thank you for your inputs.

PS: On a separate note, I do hope www.cryptorelief.in takes good measures during the current crisis and saves maximum lives and makes the whole crypto community proud.

From my experience (since I'm from a tax background and have a fair legal knowledge as well), the government is likely to come up with a scheme similar to Black Money Act, whereby those holding cryptocurrencies will have an opportunity to dispose of the cryptocurrencies they hold and offer the gains to tax along with a certain amount as regularization fees or penalty. While this does have a lot of issues while implementing, for examples what in the case of wallets that have a micro amount of crypto and are unable to dispose of the balance due to high transaction cost? What in the case of paper wallets where the private key is stored offline? etc.

However, due to recent push from crypto participants and also certain crypto funds being set up to help in COVID related support, we could see a change in the approach of the government towards a more favorable outlook towards crypto (or at least I hope so).

Further, I have separately written on how we can challenge the ban on cryptocurrencies from a legal perspective in this blog: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5334398.0

Hope you find this insightful.

Hi everyone! This is my post on how crypto users can challenge a ban on crypto imposed by their government and obtain a favorable result against the same. I have kept this post to cover maximum number of jurisdictions, so that it helps crypto communities across the globe should their government impose an outright ban on crypto. Further, I kept legal jargons to the minimum, for ease of reading.

Legal ground to be taken:

• The substance of this legal ground relies on the "Right to constitutional remedies" and "Freedom to carry out trade or practice a profession" being provided in the constitution. Hence, kindly verify if your country provides these rights. Most democratic countries provide these rights.
• Under the freedom to carry out trade or profession, any person can carry a trade/profession if it does not pose a threat to the government or other people. If the trade/profession has the potential to earn revenue, carrying out such trade should be allowed with full freedom. Now when it comes to trade/profession, the crypto economy has been supporting a number of lives that are solely/largely dependent upon crypto income. In addition to the core crypto participants such as miners, traders, etc., crypto is widely used by digital artists selling NFT, bloggers, musicians, etc. Hence, ban on crypto is equivalent of restricting the freedom to carry out trade and profession.
• Once it is established that use of crypto is one of the basic fundamental rights, the next step would be to invoke right to constitutional remedies whereby a person can file a petition before a court either as a writ petition or public interest litigation/petition (as applicable in your country) for violation of their fundamental rights by the government through such ban on crypto. In such cases, if the person petitioning is able to prove before the court that ban on crypto is essentially violating the constitutional rights, then the court would order a rollback of such ban

Fact specific ground to be taken:

• India: The Indian inter-ministerial committee in its report on cryptocurrencies has failed to identify various use cases and functions of crypto such as NFTs on which digital art thrives, charity such as the www.cryptorelief.in which is working towards oxygen supply during the ongoing COVID-19 crisis etc. Hence, it would be essential to highlight the ignorance of the legislature while passing the law, which would provide the court with a valid reason to provide relief in this regard.

Possible arguments by government and how to counter those:

• Threat to domestic currency and economics: Governments have always worried about crypto replacing their sovereign currency. Further, another area of concern for the governments is that if crypto is used as legal tender, it will face a difficulty in regulating the flow of currency, interest rates etc. In such cases, the governments are welcome to ban the 'use of crypto as legal tender', but not outright ban the crypto. In logical terms this can be explained as 'killing with a knife' has to be made illegal and merely 'using a knife' cannot be made illegal since it can be used for a lot of productive purposes. Thereafter, the government can look into classifying crypto as an asset and regulate exchange of assets.
• Threat to foreign exchange reserves: Most governments would perceive a risk of loosing their foreign exchange reserves due to investments flowing into crypto and thereby creating decrease in value of their own currency. However, this can be countered by providing details of how people stand to gain by carrying out their trade and profession through crypto and how it would in reality be a source of earning foreign exchange reserves
• Used for illegal activities: Another concern raised by governments, is that crypto is used for illegal activities such as extortion, kidnapping, ransomwares, etc. However, the argument to be taken here is that use of crypto for such activities can continue even if cryptocurrencies are banned in a country and a ban is likely not able to stop it, since there are various means of carrying out such activities. Further, similar to the logic explained above, "use of crypto in illegal activities" needs to be banned and not mere "use of crypto".
• Can be used for money laundering: One more concern of the government is that it can be used easily for money laundering, it must be noted that flow of currencies from one wallet to another can be traced easily in most blockchains. Hence, the flow of money can be traced in most cases at one point or another. Irrespective of this, where a person is found to be laundering money using cryptocurrencies, they need to be tried under the Money Laundering Act, rather than banning cryptocurrencies. The governments have a wrong notion that banning cryptocurrencies would stop money laundering through cryptocurrencies. For someone who is rogue enough to launder money, would a simple ban on cryptocurrencies stop them? Hence, banning crypto currencies is not the solution.
  

I hope this is useful. Do let me know in case you come across any other additional legal grounds that can be taken. I will be happy to incorporate the same in this post so that this can be used as a single reference point by everyone.

Further, do let me know the fact specific grounds that can be taken for your country and I would be pleased to incorporate it into my post. Thank you.

I do hope your technical analysis is right. As per my analysis, I hoped it would reach at least $65K level and started off a trade with 10x leverage. So far I have made a gain of about 50%. However, like you mentioned, if it hits $100K I would have pulled off the most successful trades of my lifetime!!  

Hi, Thank you for your kind words. Regarding your query, on how the transaction fee affects the price of Bitcoin, this is a common phenomenon in the currency/stock/commodity markets. The underlying principle in this concept is that if an asset is illiquid, i.e. not convertible to cash, such assets become least attractive. An increase in transaction fee makes Bitcoin 'less liquid' or eats up the value whenever it is being converted to cash. While there would be many who are hodling and betting long term on bitcoin, the crypto market is dictated by prices quoted by traders. Hence, decrease in liquidity of Bitcoin has cause the traders to find bitcoin as an unattractive investment.

Hope this clarifies. But needless to say, the transaction fee in itself does not cause a crash in price. It is always a number of reasons that come into play together to cause a decrease in price.

Yes, that's right! in the words of Elon, it makes more sense to store money in the form of Bitcoins rather than keeping it as cash. With Tesla and several large companies accepting Bitcoin, the demand for Bitcoin would naturally increase.

Thank you for your comments and inputs! Yes, I do agree that few of the points have mentioned always existed and do not contribute to the current situation. I will try to correct them in my analysis in the future.

Further, I an eager to know the remaining reasons that you think we should buy bitcoin. It would be helpful for me to understand Bitcoin trading better. Thanks again.

Yes, that is true. People generally tend to be attracted towards negativity rather than the positive aspects of it. They either get panicked at short term fluctuation or greedy to book short term gains and overlook the long term gains of Bitcoin.

The price of Bitcoin is hovering around USD 52K at the time of writing this article. In the last 24 hours, Bitcoin hit a bottom of USD 47K and has recovered since. Now you might be wondering if it is the right time to invest in Bitcoin. Here are the 6 reasons why you should:

1. Decreasing Mempool congestion: The current mempool congestion is said to be one of the reasons for the current fall in Bitcoin prices. While this might sound ridiculous, you can check and compare the charts of Bitcoin prices (https://www.coindesk.com/price/bitcoin) vs. the chart of Mempool Transaction count chart (https://www.blockchain.com/charts/mempool-count). While this congestion was at its peak between Apr 18 to Apr 24, it has since reduced considerably and we are already seeing Bitcoin price recover. When the mempool congestion is minimum we are likely to see the Bitcoin price rise.

2. Support price: The support price of Bitcoin has been set to around USD 48K-USD 50K by multiple exchanges and researchers (Refer: https://www.barchart.com/crypto/quotes/%5EBTCUSD/cheat-sheet and https://www.newsbtc.com/analysis/btc/bitcoin-makes-comeback-53-5k/). What this means is that when Bitcoin hits these price levels, people will be resistant to sell and large scale buying is expected. What largescale buying means is that the price of Bitcoin will shoot back up again.

3. Acceptance of Bitcoins by Corporations: Given that several large organizations are coming forward to accept Bitcoins as valid mode of payment, it is likely that Bitcoin adoption increases many folds. This is due to the reason that once these large corporation earn in bitcoin, to pay their suppliers, vendors or employees, they would naturally have to use Bitcoins. This increase in usage by itself would drive the demand for Bitcoin high. Further, on seeing large corporations accepting bitcoins, smaller organizations are likely to follow suit and same cycle would be followed by them.

4. Scarcity: While it is needless to say that bitcoin has always had the concept that it would remain scarce and that issue of new blocks would reduce over time, in the recent times, the amount of people engaging in Bitcoin mining has increased to such levels that miners get a very small portion of the mined Bitcoin. In this regard, one major pattern that I have observed is that every time that block rewards get halved the Bitcoin price slingshots to an all time high. This is is clearly visible with the Bitcoin price rising to an all time high in 2017 (1 year after halving in 2016) and now in 2021 (1 year after halving in 2020). Considering the above, I believe that bitcoin is likely to explode by the end of 2021 and break the current all time high again.

5. Increased HODLing: One more reason that I would consider is that there is an increased number of people who get attracted to the technology and concept of Bitcoin and therefore end up HODLing Bitcoin (like me) and would love to see their Bitcoin rise in value over the years rather than selling and making a quick buck. This would propel Bitcoin to higher prices without crashing.

6. Lost wallets: Around 20% of the Bitcoins that have been mined are locked in wallets (Refer: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/12/technology/bitcoin-passwords-wallets-fortunes.html). As time passes we could see a lot of people actually forgetting where they have kept the private key or seed phrase for their wallets (But ensure you keep them safe ). This is eventually going to cause decreased supply in Bitcoin over the years and help maintain the increase in Bitcoin prices.

While the above is my analysis of why Bitcoin should be purchased, please carry out your own analysis before you invest in Bitcoin. Further, while I have highlighted the reasons as to why Bitcoin needs to be purchased now, you should also consider various risks, legal/tax issues, etc. before you invest in Bitcoin.

Would be happy to hear your thoughts on this. Thank you.

If you are buying crypto in India, you can consider one of the 2 following exchanges:

1. Coinswitch Kuber: This provides the flexibility of purchasing crypto from Rs. 100. So if you are looking for micro investments, this is good. But this exchange is not transparent regarding the exchange fees. So you might be paying more price. Further, limit orders were introduced only recently for few crypto. You can register using: https://coinswitch.co/in/refer?tag=AXkD to get Rs. 50 worth of Bitcoin for free. This link expires in 24 hours. If you need a new link, please PM me.


2. WazirX: This is more transparent and proper professional exchange. It provides limit orders for all crypto, has low thresholds for most crypto (i.e. around Rs. 250- Rs. 500) and is transparent regarding all its fees. It is one of India's leading crypto exchange that is worth checking out. You can register using this link: https://wazirx.com/invite/ftktkx38

And, yes the above are my referral/affiliate links. But these do not give you any disadvantage, but rather could give you some offers in the beginning.

Yes, this sounds reasonable.

I'm from India, where the government is planning to outright ban all the cryptocurrencies. It would be an interesting move, but something that is facing a lot of resistance. Further, the government seems to be moving towards the ban with a completely misconceived notion that crypto is meant only for illegal activities. Of course there is a need for the government to have a dialogue with all the stakeholders in crypto industry before they pass any laws.

This topic is gaining more relevance in India too. Recently a committee has given a report to the parliament that states that Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are causing a drain of funds from India and need to be regulated in lines with the Foreign exchange regulations in India. Therefore, the committee has suggested an outright ban on the any sort of cryptocurrencies.

If I knew that BTC will be hitting $1m in the future I will buy BTC with the rest of my savings

To be honest, I hold only 30,000 satoshis which is a very small amount of BTC. Even with BTC hitting $1m my BTC will be worth only $300. Therefore, I would rather hold on to it.

I really wish I  had started out on BTC collection much earlier than I actually did. 

At the current rate of BTC for someone like me who stays in India, I would need about BTC0.5 a year to lead a comfortable lifestyle. So considering the same, I would peg the number of BTC i would need would be in the range of BTC25-30. However, considering the rate at which BTC is growing and estimating that the value of BTC reaches USD 200K - USD 300K, I would say that I need BTC5 to lead a comfortable life and secure my future.

Unfortunately, I do not hold so much of BTC, and I plan to accumulate at least 1 BTC by the time I reach my retirement. 

Yes, I do agree that the world has become greedier place. To be honest, I've become greedier as I saw the Bitcoin and altcoins booming. On few occasions, I have lost sleep over making quick buck overnight and it was affecting my mental health. I have had thoughts that I should have accumulated, say BTC1000 in the past through faucets when the payouts in bitcoins were huge. But I can't change the past and now I have moved towards acceptance.

I have realized that the goal in life isn't to become richer and acquire huge wealth; rather it is to have the freedom in life to do what I love. Hope this concept helps a lot of people who are chasing money and materialistic things. Thank you.

Bitcoin is not dead yet. However, a decentralized currency will always be viewed as a threat by all governments who are not able to control it. Given, that few countries are in the process of issuing a centralized cryptocurrency of the state, such as China with the Digital Yuan, it is likely that Bitcoin will be outlawed by the governments (in a phased manner with window for conversion).

Further, Bitcoin doesn't have an identity apart from being a currency whereas cryptocurrencies like Ethereum also work as a coin of a blockchain to create something on the blockchain.

I believe that the aforementioned reasons would be primary reasons for the demise of Bitcoin.