India have been trying to go cashless for a long time, even 'burning' 86% of their legal tender cash notes overnight - the 500 & 1,000 rupee notes. This lead to a bad situation for many with Indians lining up at banks for days with some crime-groups taking advantage.
This is in an effort to both purge their society of counterfeit money as well as flushing out the undeclared wealth in their society and into the banking system.
This. Has. Not. Worked.
"While this shows that demonetisation exercise has not yielded a large one-time gain, it has led to financialisation of dormant savings and helped bring down lending rates," one economist in Mumbai told Reuters.
Early in September the Indian Govt announced they are developing a national cryptocurrency using the bitcoin blueprint - This National Cryptocurrency will be called The Lakshmi Coin.
Sudarshan Sen has been quoted as saying:
“Right now, we have a group of people who are looking at fiat cryptocurrencies. Something that is an alternative to the Indian rupee, so to speak. We are looking at that closely.”
Vaibhav Parikh, partner, Nishith Desai Associates, said:
“I won’t be surprised if the government comes up with its own cryptocurrency because banks are trying blockchain as a technology and to make blockchain work it would need some cryptocurrency. Since it doesn’t trust Bitcoin it may come up with their own currency.”
It seems that Asia in general, but particularly South East Asian, (with OMG making huge strides in Thailand), Japan hugely endorsing cryptocurrency exchanges and Korea being a huge influence in the space, are really taking the lead.