16 Dec 2013 – India Times – BANGALORE: Mahin Gupta is the CEO of buysellbitco.in. His company, as the name indicates, allows Indians to trade in Bitcoin, the open source peer-to-peer payment network, using Indian rupees for transactions.
“I do around a crore of transactions each month,” he says. His company is only a few months old. But, Gupta is not happy. “We desperately need a regulatory framework for Bitcoin transactions,” he says. “Is my company a non-banking financial company? Are we foreign exchange traders? The thing with Bitcoin is that it is so new — and so unprecedented that we are not sure where we stand.”
“We have some long-term investors. Some people buy Bitcoins as a hedge, others are in it looking for a place to park their wealth,” says Gupta. “But most of the interest around Bitcoin comes from speculators,” he says.
“Essentially, the Bitcoin is a’thing’ created by a computer. In that respect, there are already laws that cover such ‘things’. Under Indian law – specifically the IT (Amendment) Act of 2008, technically, a Bitcoin is an electronic document,” says Na Vijayashankar, managing director of Ujvala Consultants, a cyberlaw consultancy firm…… Read more
