India to lead drive for global crypto regulations to bust money laundering

India's finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman has indicated the nation will uses its looming presidency of the G20 group of nations to push for multilateral regulation of cryptocurrency. Speaking during a visit to the US this week, Sitharaman said India hopes to lead an assessment of work on digital money already undertaken by …

[Anonymous Coward]

Regulate?

We regulate it by banning it, along with all the other wasteful uses of energy that don't serve the greater good.

[simonb_london]

Only governments and banks are allowed to launder money. And they hate competition.

[桜沢墨]

Regulate it?

They talk as if it's so easy to regulate something that is meant to be uncontrollable by a single party. How do they plan to regulate coins like monero that don't allow you to see how much money goes to someone, who that someone is, and who is giving the money in the first place?

[Michael Wojcik]

Re: Regulate it?

By regulating it at the interfaces to systems they do have control over.

Governments can restrict the conversion of cryptocurrencies to government-backed currency. They can require transaction histories where such conversion is allowed. They can require reporting cryptocurrency holdings and transactions (the US already requires reporting cryptocurrency transactions in income-tax returns), and penalize those found violating those requirements.

All of these things raise the cost of using cryptocurrencies, so they reduce the pool of potential cryptocurrency users (because they'll remove the most risk-averse tier who would otherwise be willing to use them), and increase the friction of using cryptocurrencies, which will discourage their use for some transactions.

No one believes governments can completely wipe out cryptocurrencies at reasonable cost. What they can do is make them less popular, reducing the size of the problem.

[Rattus]

prevent crime by making criminal activity an offence

"Sitharaman said multilateral regulation is desirable because she and other G20 members are aware of cryptocurrency being used to launder money and facilitate the global trade in illicit drugs."

Let me get this straight, they want to introduce international law to make certain (all?) cryptocurrency transactions illegal, and we want to do this because it is being used for activities that are already illegal?

hummm I am not sure that is going to reduce the "global trade in illicit drugs."

[man_iii]

Party cuckatoo

Previous govt had the CBI parrot and current govt has this "Finance" cuckatoo in charge.

My fellow ethnic origin statesperson has been in my opinion responsible for "arranging" fast track money laundering using Stooges in banking orgs and officials double printing and double destroying new minted currencies and "losing" truckloads of newly minted currencies at local bank branches "accidentally". The entire charade of demonetization was looting public coffers and establishing an aboveground fastlane for money laundering in the country with zero public oversight . All this is in my opinion.

Neither party has a future that is corruption-free and it is business as usual with free corruption thrown in no backsies.