Business Today - Paying in a different coin
Business Today covered Bitcoin. Excerpts:
“Early adopters, such as Mahin Gupta in Ahmedabad, have gained hugely. Gupta now runs a trading platform called buysellbitco.in. At the beginning of April this year, Gupta had 20 unfulfilled Bitcoin orders, as none of his contacts - some 60 people in India and the US - were willing to sell the coins.”
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“‘There are about 2,000 active Bitcoin users in India. Most of the users are individuals and want to explore the possibilities of an alternative investment opportunity,’ says Nilam Doctor, an Ahmedabad-based software professional who has invested in Bitcoins and also developed an online trading platform for the currency, rbitco.in.”
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“No e-commerce websites in India accept Bitcoins, but many Indian enthusiasts use the payment system for trade of goods and services from overseas websites.”
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“The huge demand for Bitcoins in India has largely been from speculators hoping to gain from the rising value of the currency.”
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“Until recently, Bangalore-based Bitcoin enthusiast Benson Samuel mined the currency using a botnet, or a network of computers that run applications. ‘I used to mine coins using GPUs,’ he says.”
- http://bit.ly/ZQ0MNk
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Buying bitcoins from India
A response to a question on the Bitcoin StackExchange Q&A website provides a couple of methods for being able to purchase bitcoins.
With an exchange within India once again, Buy Sell Bitcoin, the ability to purchase with cash (rupees deposited at HDFC or Axis bank), makes buying bitcoins possible without having to transfer funds internationally or suffering excessive fees.
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bitcoin:
Guardian - Remittances Around The World
The photo above accompanies a Guardian article featuring an interactive map that shows the remittance flows for the particular nation selected.
The ability to explore the map on a nation-by-nation basis (as shown above for Peru) is available only after clicking the “Leave Tour” button from the application.
Bitcoin, as a decentralized digital currency with no authorative source is beginning to gain some traction as a remittance payment method. Bitcoins are becoming fairly easy to acquire inexpensively in many areas (e.g., U.S., UK, Canada, and Europe) which correspond to areas where much of the remittance flows originate.
Since most remittance recipients use the funds for paying expenses and shopping, bitcoins aren’t (yet) quite useful to them and there are still just few methods to cash out bitcoins with a local exchanger. These methods are improving with independent exchange agents listed on LocalBitcoins.com now providing cash-out service in over 700 cities worldwide and the upcoming launch of BitcoinWireless which will let bitcoins be used to pay for mobiile phone service in more than 100 countries.
Bitcoin may have an even bigger impact for those who currently send remittances by enabling investment capital to flow quickly and cheaply to where the opportunities lie. If there is more work near a worker’s home then there is less need for that worker to live away from the family in order to provide for them. Knowledge workers are already the first to be able to work for a foreign employer without having to live abroad. And since bitcoin payments have no concept of borders, the employer can sent bitcoins to the employee at a lesser cost to both employer and employee. Increasingly these knowledge workers with foreign employers are requesting that their compensation be paid in bitcoins, and employers are increasingly willing to oblige.
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Bitcoin version 0.7.0 released
bitcoin:
A significant new release of the Bitcoin-Qt and Bitcoind clients from Bitcoin.org, v0.7.0, is now available for download.
This v0.7 release includes a number of new features, performance improvements and bug fixes and is the first major feature release since the v0.6 release nearly six months ago.
A subset of the improvements includes:
- Calls for better privacy are answered with Tor hidden service support.
- IPv6 support.
- URI Handling (click on bitcoin address, address and amount are entered for you.)
- Lower CPU usage during block downloads.
- Optional method to load blockchain from a local file.
- Raw transaction API (Full access to the blockchain data)
- Better translations (Language support)
While it is recommended to back up the wallet.dat before performing this upgrade, the update will not overwrite an existing wallet or blockchain database.
Also new since the last major release are how alternatives to the Bitcoin.org reference implementation client are featured on the Bitcoin.org Clients page. The alternatives for the desktop include:
- MultiBit: A secure, lightweight, international Bitcoin wallet for Windows, MacOS and Linux. No blockchain download required.
- Armory (Alpha): An open-source wallet-managment platform for the Bitcoin network.
- Electrum: A lightweight Bitcoin client, based on a client-server protocol. No blockchain download required.
Coming in the next significant release to bitcoin will likely be the use of LevelDB for faster access when the client reads or writes to the blockhain, and “ultraprune” which will result in a much lower storage requirement to hold the blockchain.
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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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Mondato - Underground Remittances
bitcoin:
In a newsletter from Mondato (@MondatoPortal) is an article on how underground money transfer networks are subverting central authorities as well as the traditional financial system. Excerpts:
As mobile penetration continues to grow exponentially, even in restrictive economies such as North Korea and Iran, underground value transfer may soon find a new vehicle – the mobile phone.
Newly emergent virtual currencies like Bitcoin have the capacity to fly beneath government regulations, opening alternate channels for subversive money transfer.
The international community may be powerless to stop the emergence of Bitcoin, particularly in contexts such as North Korea, Somalia, or Iran where there is demand for alternative monetary systems.
Bitcions will become more global once Coinapult expands their SMS Wallet capability beyond the U.S. and Canada. With that, bitcoins can be sent to any mobile phone with SMS text messaging. Compared to mobile transfer systems like M-PESA, fees for bitcoin transfers are trivially small.
Coinapult’s SMS text messaging wallet might have limited potential as a subversive tool, however. Unlike native Bitcoin transactions, Coinapult’s approach is dependent on the mobile phone network. This leaves it vulnerable to disruption by the authorities who control the network and could block messages send to or from Coinapult. Additionally, text messaging is not a secure communications protocol and there might be no method that would protect against a dishonest person who has access to the telecom operator’s systems.
The article’s accompanying infographic shows the scope of remittances including those to nations where there are restrictions.
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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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