India bans cryptocurrency
In my previous posts I discussed the topic of a coming global crypto crackdown. I think now it's in full swing. India recently banned cryptocurrency. Russia and China banned cryptocurrency to some extent as well. South Korea and the United States do not ban cryptocurrency but instead take the approach of actively suppressing the growth of unfavored cryptocurrencies.
Bitcoin is unlikely to ever receive mainstream adoption. This is because the IRS has a policy of capital gains taxes which make using Bitcoin (or any crypto) as a currency very financially inefficient. In addition the developers of Bitcoin itself have actually seemingly helped the IRS by avoiding scaling solutions and bickering over the soul of Bitcoin. For this reason the transaction fees make Bitcoin pretty much useless for the main and most important use case cryptocurrency has to offer (micropayments). So Bitcoin cannot do micropayments and cannot scale. Ethereum is blocked indirectly because ICO ads are pretty much banned. In the case of ICO ads I can understand that some of them may be securities so there could be legal reasons to ban these ads but of course the ban includes exchanges and crypto wallets which have nothing to do with ICOs specifically.
Banks have also been blocking transactions directly. Initially they said it would only be for credit cards but of course now debit card transactions are being blocked as well. There are even rumors of bank accounts being shut down. Why is this happening? It's all predictable, coordinated, and will likely keep happening until the community matures itself and makes critical decisions about whether crypto should be for the masses or not. Mass adoption will not be allowed without compromise of some sort with regulators and power brokers who have absolute control over who can access their local or national markets (whether it be China, India, Russia or the US).