Bitcoin India

Jonathan Stacke - Bitcoin in India

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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09/6/13

bitcoin:

Guardian - Remittances Around The World

The photo above accompanies a Guardian article featuring an interactive map that shows the remittance flows for the particular nation selected.

The ability to explore the map on a nation-by-nation basis (as shown above for Peru) is available only after clicking the “Leave Tour” button from the application.

Bitcoin, as a decentralized digital currency with no authorative source is beginning to gain some traction as a remittance payment method. Bitcoins are becoming fairly easy to acquire inexpensively in many areas (e.g., U.S., UK, Canada, and Europe) which correspond to areas where much of the remittance flows originate.

Since most remittance recipients use the funds for paying expenses and shopping, bitcoins aren’t (yet) quite useful to them and there are still just few methods to cash out bitcoins with a local exchanger. These methods are improving with independent exchange agents listed on LocalBitcoins.com now providing cash-out service in over 700 cities worldwide and the upcoming launch of BitcoinWireless which will let bitcoins be used to pay for mobiile phone service in more than 100 countries.

Bitcoin may have an even bigger impact for those who currently send remittances by enabling investment capital to flow quickly and cheaply to where the opportunities lie. If there is more work near a worker’s home then there is less need for that worker to live away from the family in order to provide for them. Knowledge workers are already the first to be able to work for a foreign employer without having to live abroad. And since bitcoin payments have no concept of borders, the employer can sent bitcoins to the employee at a lesser cost to both employer and employee. Increasingly these knowledge workers with foreign employers are requesting that their compensation be paid in bitcoins, and employers are increasingly willing to oblige.

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04/9/13

bitcoin:

Infographic: Underground Remittances

This infographic accompanied an article by Mondato on remittances.

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06/21/12

Why has Bitcoin so far gotten zero traction in India?

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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06/13/12

bitcoin:

Video: Crowdfunded with Bitcoins, Screw Banks Released

A video promoting Bitcoin with the title similar to the domain where it is hosted, ScrewBanks.net, has been released.

The video started out as a project on Max Keiser (@MaxKeiser)’s Pirate My Film (PMF) (@PirateMyFilm) crowdfunding platform. Pledges at $5 and up were made by the Bitcoin community, and once the project was fully funded, the only way to send funds was with bitcoins.

Fundraising for the project started in started in November, 2011 with the goal of raising $1,500 USD but the project was oversubscribed by the end of January and after funds were collected from all 114 “shareholders” the project took in an extra 15%. Though PMF does offer equity-based projects and each $5 contribution is referred to as a “share”, this particular project was not pitched as a revenue-generating film so there will be no dividends given to contributors (which the site labels as “shareholders”). Screw Banks was the first project on PMF in which Bitcoins were accepted for payment.

Producer of Screw Banks is Anthony Gallippi of Bit-Pay, a U.S.-based Bitcoin payment processor. ”It’s a great video targeted towards people upset with the banking system, for one reason or another” wrote Gallippi on the forum post announcing the release.

The project’s page on PMF shows the writers were StacyHerbert (@StacyHerbert) and Erik Voorhees (@ErikVoorhees), though the inclusion of a Columbian hooker in the video’s storyline means the writers made edits due to the story to reference recent developments. Other characters in the video, as shown in the Screw Banks - Credits page include Vampire Squid, Jon Corzyne, Bought Congress, PayPay and The Ben Bernank Printer.

This is the second video to be crowdfunded and paid for by the Bitcoin community. The What Is Bitcoin video on WeUseCoins.com was initially a bounty project which yielded 8,511 bitcoins (now worth more than $43K USD though that bounty was open back when Bitcoins were worth a fraction of their current value).

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05/9/12

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