India Should Buy Bitcoin

Backing the INR with BTC is a moronic idea. Since India doesn’t currently have any significant semiconductor manufacturing facilities nor surplus power to burn on mining BTC (many more important human development use cases), India (and the INR) will be under the thumb of whoever does control the mining. As it stands currently, a lot of the mining is done by bots hosted in China, with whom India has geopolitical tensions. It might even be speculated whether the central coordination + semiconductor prowess might allow China to execute a 51% attack.

It’s one thing to consider blockchain-backed databases and smart contract technology for specific use cases, and a totally different thing to peddle crap and drive the hype train with reasons such as:

> Elon Musk: The world's richest man has said that Bitcoin is "inevitable" and changed his Twitter bio to simply "#Bitcoin".

> The website coinmarketcap.com has a higher Alexa ranking (#324 at last check) than the website wsj.com (last ranked as #440).

This uses the motto, if you have a hammer everything looks like a nail.

Quite a stretch from twitter banning an insurrectionist to "prevent it with ethereum". I am amused by the creativity there. I mean, if one is wholly invested in crypto currency, pushing for it makes sense I guess.

Not a single mention of taxes anywhere in the document. How do you propose a fiscal policy with no words about taxation?

The Indian fiscal policy is all about taxation: Our last major policy change was nation-wide tax scheme for GST. The most awaited item in the budget every year is taxation, and the whole demonitization exercise was reasoned as: "this will catch people who aren't paying taxes".

How the heck do you tax BTC without any glaring loopholes?

"Even a $3B purchase of BTC might appreciate to be on par with India's gold reserves given another 10X appreciation in the Bitcoin price."

So, India should speculate on BTC, because it might go up. Got it.

Remember when Mt. Gox got hacked and over $400 million worth of BTC got stolen? That same BTC is now worth almost $30 billion. I wonder how much of that $30 billion is now circulating around?

This is nonsensical peddling by a techno-crypto bro.

Simple retort: currency is meant to be stable. He points to crypto being a trillion dollar "industry". Isn't that the same with any gambling/poker-like venture?

Edit: removed name calling.