The Supreme Court of India issued a notice on 13 November 2017 to the nation’s central bank and related financial ministries to hasten their regulatory mechanisms with regard to bitcoin. Concerns about cryptocurrency’s lack of central control and potential use for money laundering have sounded alarms throughout the country’s bureaucracies.
Supreme Court of India Orders Agencies to Regulate Bitcoin
“Lack of any concrete mechanism pending the regulatory framework,” a newly released petition to the Supreme Court of India asserts, “has left a lot of vacuum and which has resulted in total unaccountability and unregulated Bitcoin (crypto money) trading and transactions,” advocate Dwaipayan Bhowmick urged. He’s asking the country’s financial regulatory bodies be compelled to “control the flow of Bitcoin by forming a committee to frame an appropriate mechanism to regulate the same.”
The petition was granted, and was issued by Justices AM Khanwilkar and DY Chandrachud along with Chief Justice Dipak Misra.
Government fear of bitcoin is palpable, and the petition speaks to how an “emerging trend of crypto money if unchecked and unregulated is threat to exchequers money and financial sovereignty of the country,” emphasis added. Exchequers are holdovers from British colonial rule, and essentially act as a sole spending authority – a kind of central government fund made from taxation…
Read Full: Supreme Court of India Issues Notice to Reserve Bank Seeking Regulation of Bitcoin
