Via Forbes:
There goes India’s cryptocurrency market. The Reserve Bank of India banned banks from allowing people to transfer money from their bank account into Bitcoin wallets.
If banks, e-wallets and any other entities regulated by RBI are not allowed to facilitate sale or purchase of cryptocurrencies, individuals will not be able to transfer money from any bank account in India into a Bitcoin wallet like Bitpay, nor will they be able to fund purchases of cryptocurrencies on an exchange. They’d have to figure out a way to pay people in cash, meaning if there is a Bitcoin market in India, it is going to move underground.
The RBI banned Bitcoin on Thursday, effective immediately, according to The Economic Times.India is not a huge market for crypto, so Bitcoin was down only 2% today and probably not due to the RBI’s announcement. China, South Korea, Singapore, Japan and the U.S. are the biggest markets for cryptocurrencies.
Even former cheer-leading stars are giving in now, via Bloomie:
The former chief executive officer of the once-largest Bitcoin exchange, Mt. Gox, said he no longer is a Bitcoin believer, and sounded pessimistic about cryptocurrencies in general.
“The technology is definitely here to stay, but Bitcoin may have trouble evolving and keeping up,” Mark Karpeles said Wednesday in a chat on the online message board Reddit. “I could be wrong about this. I’ve been wrong about a lot of things.”
Blockchain, the technology behind Bitcoin, is a distributed ledger that can be useful in everything from managing supply chains to making cheap international money transfers. Bitcoin slipped to its lowest level so far this year Thursday, and has declined 50 percent since the beginning of the year.
Karpeles, originally from France, said he doesn’t own any Bitcoin. He also called Bitcoin’s main cryptocurrency rival, Ethereum, “too untested” for any kind of serious use.
BTC is at new closing lows today, breaking below the huge support line in the huge bearish descending triangle pattern identified yesterday:
It’s not a decisive break and the intraday low at $6000 is still intact but it’s only a matter of time as the great regulatory push back all but wipes out the libertarian crypto fantasy.
