For the love of god, get a lawyer that understands bitcoin and stop throwing random numbers out to the government.
Also, I'm curious - did they have a court issued warrant to obtain your customer data or did they intimidate you into giving it to them ?
This ^ And did they send a legal letter summoning? or was it just an obligation?
Now I am going to be flamed for this but this thread is an epitome of why people involved in BTC in India are effed. 70% don't understand the law, are willing to take unnecessary risks because they feel obligated (or intimidated or even too smart) to give opinions which might later form legal basis of what IRS/ED laws would be formed upon. For god's sake, if you are in legal trouble hire a damn lawyer. Explain him your position and let him deal with ED/IRS.
Well said. 8% is ridiculous! Throwing out such numbers will open doors for strict regulation or checks. At the same time I assume the govt. officials may have talked to other bitcoin exchange owners, who will probably be very honest in their answers.
This will leave them confused, nonetheless.
Yea but problem is even other btc owners shouldnt say anything until they hire a lawyer. Things like AML, FEMA, KYC are deep rooted laws and not simple - "I have PAN Card copies so I am safe in KYC and AML" or "Banks are responsible for checking if its customers are sticking to FEMA laws" .
Again i just cannot believe that the total bitcoins in india is like 1% or so. In the early days of bitcoin, people did not really need specialized equipments to mine bitcoins - just their computers were enough and this is where we see early adopters who have many thousands of bitcoins and this apply to every country. when govt released a press note and when the buy/sell services did pause their operations obviously these early adopters are not trying to sell bitcoins on daily basis as they do not really need to - they are not trying to speculate and hence there was no price drop. When china released the statement, there was a huge fluctuation because in china - apart from early adopters like any other country, there were also way too many late adopters who had invested in bitcoins and were partially responsible for btc to go from 200 to 1200 in two months time.
Now this has been a pet peeve of mine for sometime on this forum. This has point has been made over and over again - how RBI's circular dint make a dent in the btc price. Oh, the smallness of RBI or some story like above. Does anyone actually trade in real world? If you did, you would know RBI/India makes an impact only on India denominated pairs (ie USD/INR, EUR/INR). Nobody in EUR/USD or GBP/USD gives a shit what RBI thinks. Is there an official exchange with an INR denominated btc pair? BTC/INR? No right? If it did you would have seen a change.
And frankly we did see a change, dint we? INRBTC, BUYSELL etc are gone for good and look at the prices on LOCALBTC...its a shade of its former pricing structure now. The price of BTC/INR did fall. So get over it.
As for, China. Its the second largest market after US, regulations by it will cause changes in the BTC/USD space. Why? Because of USD's position as reserve currency.
Frankly, today Japan has more power than even US as far as btc is concerned. Why? If they ban mtgox for sometime it will cause a colossal impact on the price. Though it wont happen any time soon.