Bitcoin India

This two-day event will be held at the Sheraton Hotel in Bangalore, India on December 14th and 15th, 2013.

The lists of talks, speakers, panelists, vendors, and sponsors are still being put together but the goal of the conference is to provide an overview of where the virtual currency industry is today and its future potential — with emphasis on India’s role and future opportunities.

Additionally a Bitcoin ATM will be present for demonstration.  Trading between buyers and sellers of bitcoins will occur, including those buying and silling bitcoins with gold.  Startups who are raising funds and hiring will be present.  Investors will be there looking for entrepreneurs and startups to fund.  Payment processors will be there to help merchants get signed up to begin accepting Bitcoin that very same day!

 - https://globalbitcoinconference.com
 - https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=315551.0 (Discussion of the event)

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Ankit Ajmera (@TvventyOne)’s article, published in the Mumbai Mirror, describes Bitcoin’s presence in India.   Excerpts:

The Reserve Bank of India, for instance, has not yet formulated regulations to govern trading or profits generated from Bitcoins.

The only time Bitcoins will come under the purview of law is if a case of fraud is reported, following which cops can then initiate action against the fraudulent party.

There have been an estimated 29,400 downloads of Bitcoin wallets from Indian IP addresses. There’s the possibility that one person has downloaded more than one wallet.

 - https://bit.ly/19NOOZ9
 - https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=304384.0 (Further discussion of the article)

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bitcoinnews:

Jonathan Stacke writes on Bitcoin in India for his latest article on The Genesis Block (@TheGenesisBlock). Excerpts:

"With talk of inflation and capital controls familiar to the bitcoin community, one might think Indian citizens would be jumping at the opportunity to adopt the digital currency, yet the hurdles to wide-scale bitcoin proliferation in India may be significant for the foreseeable future. While demand for gold has grown in India, the multiple applications it offers culturally and industrially in addition to acting as an alternative store of wealth may mean that such demand does not translate to bitcoin."
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"[A correlation exists] between bitcoin adoption and internet penetration in a given country. India, with just 12.6% of its citizens having internet access, has the sixth lowest internet penetration of the 100 largest countries. Despite that fact, the size of the total Indian population – more than 1.2 billion – makes India the third largest internet-using population in the world, with 150 million users, behind only China and the US."
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"It is possible to buy and sell bitcoin through a number of websites including buysellbitco.in and there does appear to be a healthy LocalBitcoins market."
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"Not to be overlooked is India’s mobile phone penetration of 71%, or approximately 900 million total users. […] only 44 million Indians are smartphone subscribers."
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"M-PESA, the mobile payment system that has changed the lives of millions in Kenya recently rolled out in India. […] If mobile payment systems like these gain traction in India as they have in Africa, acceptance of digital currency would prove to be a less significant hurdle."
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"India had the highest remittance volume in the world in 2011 with $58 billion, or 3.1% of GDP, according to the World Bank."
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"Forward-thinking companies like Buttercoin have recently stepped in to apply the potential of bitcoin to these markets […]"
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"The Reserve Bank of India has stated that it does not immediately intend to regulate bitcoin, but their historic actions indicate that may change soon enough […]"

 - https://thegenesisblock.com/bitcoin-in-india-drivers-and-barriers-to-adoption
 - https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=288709.0 (Further discussion of this article)

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Business Today covered Bitcoin.  Excerpts:

"Early adopters, such as Mahin Gupta in Ahmedabad, have gained hugely. Gupta now runs a trading platform called buysellbitco.in. At the beginning of April this year, Gupta had 20 unfulfilled Bitcoin orders, as none of his contacts - some 60 people in India and the US - were willing to sell the coins.”
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“‘There are about 2,000 active Bitcoin users in India. Most of the users are individuals and want to explore the possibilities of an alternative investment opportunity,’ says Nilam Doctor, an Ahmedabad-based software professional who has invested in Bitcoins and also developed an online trading platform for the currency, rbitco.in.”
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"No e-commerce websites in India accept Bitcoins, but many Indian enthusiasts use the payment system for trade of goods and services from overseas websites."
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"The huge demand for Bitcoins in India has largely been from speculators hoping to gain from the rising value of the currency."
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"Until recently, Bangalore-based Bitcoin enthusiast Benson Samuel mined the currency using a botnet, or a network of computers that run applications. ‘I used to mine coins using GPUs,’ he says."

 - https://bit.ly/ZQ0MNk

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A response to a question on the Bitcoin StackExchange Q&A website provides a couple of methods for being able to purchase bitcoins.

With an exchange within India once again, Buy Sell Bitcoin, the ability to purchase with cash (rupees deposited at HDFC or Axis bank), makes buying bitcoins possible without having to transfer funds internationally or suffering excessive fees.

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Forum user minorman on BitcoinTalk.org describes in a post a number of attributes that would indicate Bitcoin should be starting to gain a little interest in India but to-date, so little progress has been made.

minorman writes in support of the open question:

• India has more programmers/computer people than the rest of the world combined.
• People in India love tangible assets (gold/silver)
• The Rupee is crashing and the gold price has just hit an all time high in Rupees.
• 108 people in India have no bank account or otherwise access to financial services.
• Millions of Indians live outside India and send money to/from relatives in India.
• Unlike China, India has no “great firewall”.

The forum board has a restriction the limits new users to a specific newbie forum as an approach to limit posting of duplicate questions and to bring trolling to manage levels on the other boards once a new user “graduates” (or gets whitelisted) out of the newbie forum.  This is an unfortunate hurdle that the moderators felt needed to be put in place but the equivalent of “forum vandilism” that had been occurring had made the boards unusable for everyone without this restriction.

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An article featured on MoneyControl.com introduces its visitors to Bitcoin.  Excerpts:

Bitcoin is a mathematical money system driven by code. It allows users to send money directly from their computer to another on the other side of the world.

Units can be sold on online marketplaces in exchange for dollars, euro, sterling, Polish zloty, Australian dollars, renmimbi, yen and others.

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