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India Taking On Exchanges
62 sats \ 1 comment \ @TheBTCManual 14 Aug 2022 bitcoin
Do any plebs know what's going on in India? I've noticed them hitting exchanges hard in recent weeks the first one was the WazirX which was supposedly owned by Binance now not owned by Binance lol, wtf is going on there?
According to techcrunch.com the government has now gone after them also for criminal charges of money laundering and non compliance of KYC
Is this the gambit they are going to be using to "suppress" bitcoin in their country?
Is there any data on P2P trading in India, is it picking up? Because that's the thesis we rely on, centralised exchanges go down P2P trading picks up, and in a population of 1 billion, this could be super bullish, dispersing coins across so many people would be fantastic for adoption.

My personal feelings

Sucks if people lose their jobs because of it, but they can go do something more constructive instead of shilling scams and grey securities. I am always happy to see decentralisation being tested and the squeese is coming, we can see that with the whole tornado cash, the shitcoiners got to brazen and too loud and since bitcoin is lumped into the shit show I think a purge is good, kill projects and platforms and force liquidity back into bitcoin
I am not calling for regulation, just looking at the bright side of the situation
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11 sats \ 0 replies \ @cryptocoin 14 Aug 2022
Here are a couple other posts that shared other articles on the topic:
Indian Government Raids Director of Crypto Exchange WazirX, Freezes $8.1M #55043 https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/08/05/indian-government-raids-director-of-binance-owned-crypto-exchange-wazirx-freezes-814m/ https://archive.ph/qBemw
India authorities freeze Vauld exchange’s assets worth $46.5 mln #57985 https://forkast.news/headlines/india-authorities-freeze-vauld-exchanges-assets-worth-46-5-mln/
Neither those posts nor the articles provide much additional information to help answer your question as to what's the true story on the ground.
The issue with Binance and WazirX has to do with foreigners and by the indications I've seen this means Chinese investors who were doing lending in India out of the view of the regulators.
P2P volumes in India (nor most anywhere) have not spiked, per CoinDance -- but that is only Paxful and LocalBitcoins. The trend direction shows the same on UsefulTulips.
The reason P2P trading would pick up is if there are sellers with bitcoin wanting INR and if there are buyers with INR wanting bitcoin. The nuambers are saying there is less of that today than a year ago, and even less than two years ago. Maybe those who were trading P2P are now doing it without using the P2P platforms. There are Whatsapp, Telegram and Discord groups where buyers and sellers are finding each other.
The rupee has lost value relative to the dollar, but not at a terribly high rate (just under 5% since December 2021 levels). So that catalyst for bitcoin activity has been subdued. But if the rate it is losing value increases, that would bring a lot more interest towards buying bitcoin, and with limited centralized exchange methods P2P trading could jump quite a bit.
There's definitely interest in earning "crypto". Axie Infinity "pay to play to earn" (which was ultimately just a ponzi) saw many tens of thousands of "players" in India, rising to that level in just a matter of months.
But there just aren't many opportunities for earning bitcoin online.
As far as the crackdown, these things happen and the level of activity overall dies down, but the level of activity underground increases. Over time, the underground activity grows until it starts to push back (e.g., used openly by street vendors, etc.) And when that happens, further growth becomes unstoppable.
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