Exactly! It doesn't make any sense to ban cryptocurrencies. The government's view is that cryptocurrencies are being used in illicit activities and money laundering due to its anonymous nature. But the fact is, just by writing something in law book, you still won't be able to stop such activities. People can still use cryptocurrencies for illicit activities and get away with that.
Banning will only result in stoppage of legal activities like trading on KYC-exchange, using cryptocurrencies to pay/receive payments for the legal foreign contracts, using cryptocurrencies as the mean of payment in legal business, etc. This would rather result in lost-revenue for government as all these activities are good source of income for government in the form of tax.
The on-going discussion in Indian section:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5313220Someone should bring their attention to the fact the INR is also used for illicit and criminal activities, and the usage of that is far more as the number of bitcoiners in India is only a handful with respect to the whole population. Sure BTC may be more popular among the people who commit cybercrime, but on a whole, fiat is much more prevalent.
India has talked about introducing their own crypto called "Lakshmi" in the past (~2018). But that was buried and BTC was banned by the RBI and then again Supreme Court overturned the ban in 2020, only for them to discuss this AGAIN? I think India might be missing out by trying to restrict this. They still haven't provided their definition of "Private Crypto", although that's probably gonna be any crypto other than the official govt. regulated one. I also suspect that this will lead to privatized versions of crypto owned by each big corporate company in India, and those will be probably okayed and given the green signal. This is a bad move on India's part and just stifling the development of this kind of technology that may as well be the future we are heading towards.