'Govts can't ban peer to peer transactions in bitcoins'

No one can stop two willing individuals from transacting in bitcoins. That's what the founders of crypto-trading platforms Unocoin and Coinsecure believe, despite the government's recent declaration that it will eliminate all payment uses of cryptocurrencies.

The discussion on bitcoins among Jincy Samuel, COO of Coinsecure, Sathvik Vishwanath, founder of Unocoin, and Nikhil Narendran, head of technology at law firm Trilegal, saw the panelists explain what exactly cryptocurrency is, and the future of these currencies.
Vishwanath said a bitcoin was basically a currency like gold or rupee and a payment network like Visa or Mastercard. It's an open source and decentralized virtual currency, whose software is open for everyone to access, with no single authority regulating their issue.

"Bitcoin was introduced in 2009 by a Japanese author Satoshi Nakamato. He wrote the software in a way that the issuance happens in a decentralized manner," he said.
So far 16.5 million of the potential 21 million bitcoins have already been mined. Vishwanath said only 12.59 bitcoins are generated every 10 minutes and the belief that anyone can mine bitcoins was wrong, because mining requires enormous computing power.
Samuel said the popularity of bitcoins was growing rapidly in India. in December Coinsecure was doing 300 to 500 KYCs (or user registrations) a day. "Now we get 800 per day," she said.
Talking about the recent regulatory challenges that the trading platforms have faced, Narendran said that whenever a new technology comes, people are sceptical about it. "For the first time there is a form of communication for exchange to happen between one person and another without an intermediary," he said.
He said it was difficult for the government to ban the digital asset altogether. "It is similar to gold (as an asset class). And if I want to buy an iPhone with bitcoin and if the shopkeeper is fine to sell it for bitcoin, it is not illegal," Narendran said.
Samuel added that an individual gets to decide what he wants to do with the currency. "A government should not be banning transactions," she said.

However they all agreed that government regulation is welcome. "It will help if government can come up with something concrete. Currently, the government wants to curb illicit transactions. That's something all platforms are doing themselves," Samuel said, adding that the white paper on bitcoins came out only in 2013 so it's unfair to expect a baby to start acting like a mature adult.

A young 20-year-old in the audience who has invested almost Rs 75,000 in bitcoins wanted to know whether the platforms would be introducing trading in other cryptocurrencies. Both the platforms said they are in the process of doing so.