IRS visit to CoinMonk Ventures office in Tumkur

[dashingriddler]

Hello,
Today I had about 15 guys from IRS visiting the office. Out of that two guys had attended bitcoin conference on dec 15th. They had emailed me to get the free passes but had failed to identify themselves that they are from I T department.
As soon as they came, they searched entire office for any records they may find and also took interview from employees and have searched their computers. They also asked me lot of questions about the business we are doing and income we are earning and the income tax that is being paid.
As they relaized CoinMonk is a very newly registered company and the company objectives includes "crytography related product sales and services" they were happy that we have formed the company properly to do the business. They also did ask about KYC documents we have for Unocoin.com and they looked into it.
Then the dicussion totally deviated to the topic about what is bitcoin and how it works, how IT department can put income tax on miners, how they can track cash sales of bitcoins, how many bitcoiners are there in India and how many bitcoins they have etc for which i have given as much and as accurate info as possible to my knowledge. For them to ask miners to pay income tax based on the present value of the bitcoin, i have asked them to authorize bitcoin exchanges so that miners can convert bitcoin to INR and pay the INR to IT or else have IT dept accept income tax in bitcoins itself. Regarding the numbers, i have said about 8% of bitcoin economy may be in india which is about 1 million btc. And we may have about 30,000 people with bitcoin wallets with some bitcoins on it based on my experience and understanding and info from other people in meetings. i also had to explain them how the bitcoin becomes tracable and how they can atleast regulate it at entry and exit points which happens at exchanges.
I had to type the answers for their questions and i had to sign for the printouts.
They took some of the bitcoin related documents i had along with KYC documents i have collected from various Unocoin.com customers in a DVD which they made sure it is readable in their laptop.
Now they have issued summons to me to come and meet in their office tomorrow in Bangalore.

All i can say regarding today discussion is, i was able to lead it in as positive way as possible and hope i can do the same tomorrow as well. i will update this thread tomorrow after the discussion with them. wish me luck

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[sidjourn]

Looks like everything went just fine!

Fantastic news.

Please keep updating this thread.

[G K G]

hope evrything works out in a good way for you and all the bitcoiners in india.

All the Best.

[techguy]

Regarding the numbers, i have said about 8% of bitcoin economy may be in india which is about 1 million btc.

Really 

All the Best !!

[Benson Samuel]

Regarding the numbers, i have said about 8% of bitcoin economy may be in india which is about 1 million btc.

Really 

All the Best !!

I do hope that nothing adverse occurs due to this careless assessment of Bitcoin in india.

[dishwara]

I wish new year brings good prospect to you & all bitcoiners of India.

[dashingriddler]

Regarding the numbers, i have said about 8% of bitcoin economy may be in india which is about 1 million btc.

Really 

All the Best !!

I do hope that nothing adverse occurs due to this careless assessment of Bitcoin in india.

That is my analysis based on the population of india which is about 15% of world's population and India being backward in bitcoin for now. Obviously not every one who has bitcoin will declare that they have XX bitcoins in public. I still believe we have near to a million btc with in India. Just that not many people are buying and selling them as there is no proper bitcoin exchange (and no proper way to convert lot of btc to INR in an accountable way) and they are just preserving them for now and this made the bitcoin prices not to drop when rbi statement came out and exchanges did pause operation. We all know that the exact number cannot be reached no matter what and this itself was one of the concern of that IRS officer.

[techguy]

Regarding the numbers, i have said about 8% of bitcoin economy may be in india which is about 1 million btc.

Really 

All the Best !!

I do hope that nothing adverse occurs due to this careless assessment of Bitcoin in india.

+1

I doubt that 8% figure. When compared to global community, I think India community is much behind the race. Following are some of the statistics based on number of miners, legality, awareness...etc. So based on these figures India bitcoin would stand in the range of 0.01% to 0.1% ?  (Note : I have not done much study on this computation. This is just a rough guess based on the following links. )

http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/1706/any-statistics-on-usage-of-bitcoins-by-region-or-country
http://bitcoinstatus.rowit.co.uk/
http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=bitcoin&date=today+1-m
https://blockchain.info/nodes-globe?series=topBlockRelay
https://blockchain.info/charts

[Benson Samuel]

Regarding the numbers, i have said about 8% of bitcoin economy may be in india which is about 1 million btc.

Really 

All the Best !!

I do hope that nothing adverse occurs due to this careless assessment of Bitcoin in india.

That is my analysis based on the population of india which is about 15% of world's population and India being backward in bitcoin for now. Obviously not every one who has bitcoin will declare that they have XX bitcoins in public. I still believe we have near to a million btc with in India. Just that not many people are buying and selling them as there is no proper bitcoin exchange (and no proper way to convert lot of btc to INR in an accountable way) and they are just preserving them for now and this made the bitcoin prices not to drop when rbi statement came out and exchanges did pause operation. We all know that the exact number cannot be reached no matter what and this itself was one of the concern of that IRS officer.

I bet you that Sunny's or techguy's assesment of 0.5% - 1 % is more accurate. And those were random numbers thrown!
Calculate this based on nodes, claims, mining equipment purchases and tracking.. etc.. Not flimsy %ages

[ajax3592]

Regarding the numbers, i have said about 8% of bitcoin economy may be in india which is about 1 million btc.

Woaah ! wtf was that ?

Okay, assumed for a second even if it is (impossible although)...why would you want to disclose such big numbers to authorities, remember government is not a friend of crypto. They will try whatever they can to crush it, every country's government.

[dashingriddler]

1% is 120000 btc. i m way too sure we have more than that in India.
Regarding the numbers to govt officials, the more adopters and the higher btc they hear - they feel it is more urgent to react instead of just giving uncertain statements or just saying they are waiting and watching. We should be ready to hear the answer from them sooner than later. It is not so great they wait for ever and bring some kind of retrospective law and prosecute every one who have done anything with bitcoin. On the other hand if they continue delaying to say what exactly they want to do with bitcoin, the wide spread adoptation just cannot happen - miners are afraid to mine bitcoins, business are afraid to accept bitcoins and consumers are afraid to purchase bitcoins. If govt always kept quite, it would have been a different issue. Now India is just left with an unclear statement regarding the usage of bitcoins and the buying/selling service had to pause their operations because they dont know what to do. If they do not want to regulate it for ever, let them say that or if they want to say bitcoin operations will be considered as illegal in india or allowed in India let them say that. We cannot operate any profitable bitcoin business in india at the present situation till we have more clearer explanation from them.

[thenoblebot]

Your intentions seem good but please don't make up the numbers like that or alternatively you could just say "that would be difficult to asses" and be honest (not in anyway implying you are dishonest, just that throwing numbers like this w/o any basis is useless) about it.

Edit : lol I meant it to be "assess" not "asses" .. but ill just let it be 

[dashingriddler]

Hello,
ofcourse that information is not known is my first answer. but they really needed an approx number and i ended up saying about 8% and i did tell them that it can never be verified to be true.

[sa1]

Those numbers seem way too high. Considering that only 411 people bought from buysellbitco.in, the number of people seen on this forum, the fact that mining became out of reach of most people here before awareness, and that it was very tough to buy after that due to lack of exchanges, it seems way too farfetched. RBI's statement had no effect on bitcoin prices. i.e very few were trading on exchanges abroad.

[Amitabh S]

I seriously doubt India has more than 50000 bitcoins. Please make sure you emphasize this is your view only and others have very different figures in mind.

[Benson Samuel]

1% is 120000 btc. i m way too sure we have more than that in India.
Regarding the numbers to govt officials, the more adopters and the higher btc they hear - they feel it is more urgent to react instead of just giving uncertain statements or just saying they are waiting and watching. We should be ready to hear the answer from them sooner than later. It is not so great they wait for ever and bring some kind of retrospective law and prosecute every one who have done anything with bitcoin. On the other hand if they continue delaying to say what exactly they want to do with bitcoin, the wide spread adoptation just cannot happen - miners are afraid to mine bitcoins, business are afraid to accept bitcoins and consumers are afraid to purchase bitcoins. If govt always kept quite, it would have been a different issue. Now India is just left with an unclear statement regarding the usage of bitcoins and the buying/selling service had to pause their operations because they dont know what to do. If they do not want to regulate it for ever, let them say that or if they want to say bitcoin operations will be considered as illegal in india or allowed in India let them say that. We cannot operate any profitable bitcoin business in india at the present situation till we have more clearer explanation from them.

Please do not push people into knee jerk reactions. The government officials need to understand the entire gamut of what they are dealing with. If they are pushed to a corner with false numbers and claims, this will only get a bad decision at the end of it all.
We really do not need an urgent reaction. Would be better to think of the entire community and widespread usage of Bitcoin rather than few businesses that have stalled for no reason.

[subvolatil]

When will you businesses learn that making  such claims dont  help. dont over exaggerate the numbers.

P.s - just because there  is  a high number of  downloads in india  does not mean that people  are  using bitcoins.



 

[wetsuit]

For the love of god, get a lawyer that understands bitcoin and stop throwing random numbers out to the government.

Also, I'm curious - did they have a court issued warrant to obtain your customer data or did they intimidate you into giving it to them ?

[RandomRabbit10]

1 million bitcoins with Indians sounds way off the mark. That translates to a market value of USD700mn to USD 750mn (Rs 4,200 to Rs. 4,500 crores). Highly unlikely.

Putting out such a high number there will probably interest the IT guys even more from a money laundering angle!

[ajax3592]

Maybe we should make a Q/A form Benson with what info (answers) should be given to authorities based on the questions they asked from Mahin and coin monk. Could come handy to BIG coin holders and miners here in India, in case of a random raid.

@Coin Monk: I can bet you, Indian government will never give a statement like "Bitcoin can be freely accepted by merchants in India" etc. positive things like that, you get the point. Bitcoin is designed in a way that if it gets mainstream, it will take power away from the central banks, it is much more bigger than just another money transfer method, currency or get rich quick thing. (It can even topple governments and lead to revolution)

There are two exceptions though:

1) If US passes a very positive statement about it, then India will follow their footsteps since Indian government is puppet and is driven by cash from capitalists...and it's impossible for these 70-80 yr old asses (yes asses) leading our country to understand such complicated stuff and make a judgement on their own.

2) India gets leaded by some party which believes in decentralization (obviously other than those BJP, Congress MFs) maybe AAP, dunno.