Reserve Bank of India (RBI) governor Shaktikanta Das on Friday reiterated his call for an outright ban on cryptocurrencies, saying these are "nothing but gambling" and their perceived "value is nothing but make-believe."
To further its opposition to such currencies and also to take a lead over other central banks, the central bank recently launched its own digital currency, in the form of e-rupee on a pilot mode, first for the wholesale in late last October and a month later for retail customers.
Addressing Business Today meet this evening in New Delhi, Das reiterated the need for an outright ban on cryptos saying though those supporting it call it an asset or a financial product, there is no underlying value in it not even a tulip (alluding to the Dutch tulip mania blow-up in the early part of the past century). "Every asset, every financial product has to have some underlying (value) but in the case of crypto there is no underlying. not even a tulip.and the increase in the market price of cryptos, is based on make-believe. So anything without any underlying, whose value is dependent entirely on make-believe, is nothing but 100 per cent speculation or to put it very bluntly, it is gambling," the governor said.
"Since we don't allow gambling in our country, and if you want to allow gambling, treat it as gambling and lay down the rules for gambling. But crypto is not a financial product," Das asserted. Warning that legalizing cryptos will lead to more dollarization of the economy, he said cryptos masquerading as a financial product or financial asset, is a completely misplaced argument. Explaining it, he said the bigger macro reason for banning them is that cryptos have the potential to and the characteristics of becoming a means of exchange; an exchange of doing a transaction
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