Indian Reserve Bank Governor: Bitcoin is Fascinating
New Delhi Television Limited, one of India’s largest TV networks, aired a show featuring an interview with the Governor of Reserve Bank of India (RBI), Raghuram Rajan. The show, which was titled “India Forecast,” gathered students from several local universities to ask the head of India’s central bank various questions about the economy.
Rajan said that Bitcoin “is fascinating.”
“I have no doubt that down the line, we will be moving towards primarily a cashless society and we’ll have some kind of currencies like this which will be at work. For us at the Reserve Bank, this may happen in 10 to 20 years from now. [I] think these virtual currencies will certainly get much better, much safer and over time will be the form of transaction, and that’s for sure.”
India is a huge country with a huge population of 1.2 billion people, more than 15% of the total world’s population, and it’s the world’s largest democracy. India is in a good position to leapfrog over legacy technologies and practices and adopt next generation fintech easier than Western countries. Internet usage, a prerequisite for the widespread adoption of a digital currency, is booming: India is about to overcome the United States as second-largest Internet market, with 302 million Internet users, a 32 percent increase from the 213 million Indian Internet users at the end of 2013.
Also read: India to Overcome United States as Second-Largest Internet Market by December
Rajan thinks that, at this moment, the two main shortcomings of Bitcoin are security and volatility. Security because users are still too vulnerable to theft and scams, and volatility because a currency whose value fluctuates so much as Bitcoin doesn’t offer a stable store of value, and therefore is less useful as money.
The video originally shared by BraveNewCoin is now private, but here is a clip found on Youtube:
Images from TK Kurikawa and Shutterstock.
