One of India’s former finance ministers, Subhash Chandra Garg, is making headlines as he spars with industry leaders over the potential of cryptocurrencies and blockchain initiatives.
Mohammad Musharraf reports at Cointelegraph that Gang was able to clarify some of his prior comments at a huddle with private sector innovators recently.
“(Gang) discussed cryptocurrencies with Indian industry leaders including Nischal Shetty, the CEO of Indian crypto exchange WazirX, and Siddharth Sogani, the founder of blockchain research company Crebaco,” Musharraf writes.
As reported, Gang explained that cryptocurrencies as regulated commodities may have a place in India’s financial system. With that said, he warned against any attempt to use cryptocurrencies as payment media, citing ban efforts and imposed jail sentences promoted by some legislators as a way to curb the Indian citizen’s use of decentralized coins.
“In Garg’s opinion, there is no issue with anyone presenting a “computer code” as a digital asset and with people wanting to invest in it,” Musharraf writes. “But in that way, he said, crypto is more of a tradable commodity and not a currency, and it should be regulated from the same viewpoint.”
Gang also talked about efforts to digitize the rupee, India’s fiat currency, and how that would work, expressing favor for immutable ledger technologies in general, but reiterating that cryptocurrencies should not be used for everyday transactions, which he expressed in a sort of strange way, translation notwithstanding:
“The way cryptocurrency works is on the distributed ledger technology,” Gang reportedly said. “It’s a high investment technology. It can never be a common man’s currency.”
Looking at these kinds of proposed bans and how they usually fail shows us a lot about how cryptocurrency works in today’s globalized financial world. Keep an eye out if you have holdings in crypto, or are thinking about getting involved in the world of decentralized finance.