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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Benson Samuel - Bitcoin In India?
Benson Samuel (@BensonSamuel) blogs on Bitcoin from Bangalore. His latest post introduces his readers to the Bitcoin ecosystem and describes some of the opportunities and challenges for Bitcoin in India, specifically. Excerpts:
Several new exchanges are being setup for India, and it is only a matter of time, before we can have a robust environment supporting Bitcoins in an open marketplace.
Several Indians participate in forums on Tor and have started engaging in open discussions about betterment and open business.
As long as there is prohibition of an item of need or desire, there will remain a Black Market. As long as this continues, Bitcoin will have value and will continue to grow. Bitcoin will replace or become the main currency in lands where modern banking has failed. It will remain a steadfast channel of alternative commerce where the need is.
Inspired Indians have taken up the challenge to reshape the way we have banked for decades.
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'Cash deposit' Method For Buying Bitcoins Reaches India
Bitcoin exchanges have found the magic formula that allows funds to flow and a new exchange, Mr. Bitcoins, is taking it to India!
For the first time ever for the country, those wishing to buy bitcoins can simply bring their Rupees to a bank (HDFC) and make a deposit into a special account for the exchange. Those funds are then converted to bitcoins and the digital currency is delivered to the Bitcoin address the customer specified.
Mr. Bitcoins launched in May and offers this cash deposit method in Australia and the United States as well. The exchange is operated by Kenseycol PTY LTD out of Australia.
This method will likely be valuable for its convenience — funds from cash deposits are converted either the same day or next business day.
The exchange rate that is quoted is real-time but it is somewhat higher than the BTC/USD exchange rate after further converting it using the USD/INR conversion rate. There are no additional fees however, causing this method to be cheaper than sending an international bank wire or other money transfer service such as Western Union.
Update: We’ve been asked to explain in more detail how to use this service:
- Visit Mr. Bitcoins, click on the INR tab.
- Enter your e-mail address, your bitcoin address (e.g., from Instawallet), and the amount (in BTCs) that you wish to buy. Then click the Buy Bitcoins button.
- You will then see a receipt with the HDFC account name, account number and the amount (in INRs) to deposit.
- Print the receipt and take it with you to the nearest HDFC where you deposit cash into the account shown on the receipt. Once Mr. Bitcoins sends the bitcoins, you can monitor the transaction’s progress towards getting confirmed using Blockchain.info.
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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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Another BTC/INR Market Opens - Free Trading
Bitcoin-Central.net is an exchange that has been operating since 2010, which is long in the tooth as far as Bitcoin exchanges go. The exchange recently added a INR deposit method and operates a BTC/INR market — the second exchange to now serve those wishing to buy and sell Bitcoins with the rupee.
Bitcoin-Central exchange has no trading fees. Adding funds to the exchange account involves sending a bank wire transfer to the exchange’s bank account with ICICI (fee applies). Withdrawal to any bank in India is available as well (fee applies).
Support from the exchange is available by e-mail from: [email protected]
The exchange offers either Google or Yubikey multifactor authentication methods which can lessen the security risks significantly compared to transacting against exchanges without these methods.
Support fort the INR currency was just recently added so if the market follows the pattern that other new markets followed then first will appear some bids and offers that are far apart (a wide spread). Then sporadic trades will likely occur before the market starts to function with competitive offers on one or both sides and eventually an efficient market becomes the result.
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How many bitcoins will 1,000 INR buy?
BTCRate.com provides a tool for converting between bitcoins and Indian Rupees.
The tool uses the BTC/USD market rate from the Mt. Gox exchange and then uses the USD/INR exchange rate from XE.
When this post was composed (May 24, 2011) 1,000 INR will buy a little more than 3 BTCs.
- INR per 1 BTC (BTC/INR)
- BTC per 1 INR
The SI unit for a one thousandth of a bitcoin (0.001 BTC) is MilliBitcoin though there is not yet a widely used name to refer to unit smaller than a bitcoin.
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