Supreme Court lifts RBI ban on trading in cryptocurrencies

They are officially called virtual currencies in India.

"The Supreme Court on Wednesday struck down the curb on cryptocurrency trade in India. “SC rules curb on crypto currency trade illegal,” the report said while adding that the order lifted ban on trading in virtual currency, cryptocurrency and bitcoins.

Bitcoin, the most valued cryptocurrency in the world, was down 0.39 per cent at $8,815. The market cap of the currency stood at $161 billion."

Read more here

Link to Judgement

Woah. I never thought I'd see the day.

Good move, IMO. They can tax crypto exchanges.

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Crypto brings its pros & cons. Good move though from the court.

According to unocoin, INR deposits and withdrawals will go live by 09th March. Seems like a huge win

There are some hilarious gems in the judgement

Note that, not all of these are absolutes, but may be stating one side of an argument, taken out of context. But the wording is still incredibly interesting. This is faaar from a boring judgement. There are smaller jabs (mostly aimed at RBI) hidden throughout. There is also a brief history of RBI in the judgement.

The archeological excavations carried out at the (world wide web) sites, reveal that this digital currency civilization is just 12 years old (at the most, 37 years).

Then comes perhaps one of the most unique sentences in any judgement, because it contains ideals about a creation myth, DNA sequencing, vedas and virtual currencies all in one go.

Any attempt to define what a virtual currency is, it appears, should follow the Vedic analysis of negation namely “neti, neti”. Avadhuta Gita of Dattatreya says, “by such sentences as ‘that thou are’, our own self or that which is untrue and composed of the 5 elements, is affirmed, but the sruti says ‘not this not that’.” The concept of Neti Neti is an expression of something inexpressible, but which seeks to capture the essence of that to which no other definition applies. This conundrum will squarely apply to crypto currencies and hence this flashback, into its genesis, so that its DNA is sequenced.

The theme of the song of the petitioners in one of the writ petitions, as fine-tuned by Shri Ashim Sood, learned Counsel, can be summarized as follows:

. Note and remember the name of this man, the learned counsel, Shri Ashim Sood, he is the person who successfully argued for the lifting of the cryptocurrency ban in India.

No study was undertaken by RBI before the impugned measure was taken and hence, the impugned decisions are not even based upon knowledge or expertise.

Rekt

So those, who've sold Bitcoins & GPU's during this ban are at huge loss now? :chinscratch:

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Flash said:
So those, who've sold Bitcoins & GPU's during this ban are at huge loss now?

GPU rush for bitcoin mining is long over & I doubt anybody sold bitcoins solely because of this ban.In case you don't know,bitcoin prices took some huge swings in the past & even now there was a very big surge followed by allegations of manipulation.

Anorion said:
Note and remember the name of this man, the learned counsel, Shri Ashim Sood, he is the person who successfully argued for the lifting of the cryptocurrency ban in India.

Who is he?

He just argued the case very well. Could have easily swung the other way. He managed to convince the judges that the RBI didn't know what they were doing.
One of the arguments that he used, which was convincing, was that the adoption of blockchain technologies could be a hindrance because of the virtual currency (cryptocurrency) ban imposed by the RBI.
Also, he managed to convince the court that those companies that were not outright scams, were proactively following procedures from their side that they were not even required to, such as KYC etc.
essentially, gg

Wow, I can't believe that the whole premise of the ban was that crypto exchanges were scams. However, I don't think adoption of blockchain technologies would be hindered by the ban.

I can imagine koinex and other traders having some influence, indirectly, in convincing the judges

Nerevarine said:
I can imagine koinex and other traders having some influence, indirectly, in convincing the judges

Desmond David said:
Wow, I can't believe that the whole premise of the ban was that crypto exchanges were scams.

Yeah, that was it, it was hilarious when it was going down also. Funny thing is, we could have gotten cheap oil from Venezuela if it was not for this whole mess. Might have shared this elsewhere in the forum, but step by step breakdown is:

Stage 1: Proliferation of ponzi schemes disguised as cryptocurrency based "get rich quick" investments
GainBitcoin (link)
DietBitcoin (link)
OneCoin (link)
MoneyTradeCoin - MTC (link)
RippleFuture (link)
NCRCoin (link)
ATCCoin (link)

Stage 2: India bans cryptocurrencies, because of the scams
Finance Ministry's big problem with cryptocurrencies are the ponzi schemes (link)
The scams have very little, or nothing to do with cryptocurrencies (link)
RBI bans Indian banks from dealing in cryptocurrencies because of "associated risks" (link)
Another reasoning: "fence the RBI regulated entities from the risk of dealing with entities associated with virtual currencies" (link)

Stage 3: India rejects buying Venezuela oil for cheap using cryptocurrencies
Venezuela proposes: (link)
India rejects: “We cannot have any trade in cryptocurrency as it is banned by the Reserve Bank of India. We will see which medium we can use for trade.” (link)

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whitestar_999 said:
GPU rush for bitcoin mining is long over & I doubt anybody sold bitcoins solely because of this ban.In case you don't know,bitcoin prices took some huge swings in the past & even now there was a very big surge followed by allegations of manipulation.

Flash said:
So those, who've sold Bitcoins & GPU's during this ban are at huge loss now?

I have seen many people shifting to websites like these Contact - Smartcryptomining
One can save money, time in the long run. But one question which is always there is that if these kinda cloud mining companies have access to these huge high end machines then why are they letting people mine via it? Someone I know was earning good amount from a cloud mining site, I am not in touch with him to ask which website was that.

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Desmond David said:
Woah. I never thought I'd see the day.

Good move, IMO. They can tax crypto exchanges.

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That will be very hard to do. But then again there are loopholes everywhere.

billubakra said:
That will be very hard to do. But then again there are loopholes everywhere.

The only way to get bitcoins is to either exchange cash with crypto exchanges or sell products/services and charge in bitcoins. If you exchange cash for bitcoins, then govt. can levy tax on the transaction.

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Desmond David said:
The only way to get bitcoins is to either exchange cash with crypto exchanges or sell products/services and charge in bitcoins. If you exchange cash for bitcoins, then govt. can levy tax on the transaction.

What if they are exchanged with exchanges which are based outside India?

billubakra said:
What if they are exchanged with exchanges which are based outside India?

Then they do. Though if RBI is so inclined, they could apply restrictions on international transactions. These are already in place on many local cards.

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Desmond David said:
Then they do. Though if RBI is so inclined, they could apply restrictions on international transactions. These are already in place on many local cards.

Brother I hire a cloud mining service>>pay them with my card>>I get bitcoins. Now after converting them to say USD I will, in most cases, either park them in an overseas account or get it transferred here and pay taxes. They will never know that I got this money from bitcoins

That could happen but I think that's the exception. Very few would be willing to jump through those many hoops.

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Desmond David said:
That could happen but I think that's the exception. Very few would be willing to jump through those many hoops.

Actually "many" people are doing exactly that.

Regulations are incoming!