Today we got some hot information out of the Indian government as it's saying compliance issues with nine offshore crypto exchanges. Under PMLA otherwise known as Prevention of Money Laundering Act the government is not blocking these urls from being access in their country.
The list is as follows...
Binance
KuCoin
Huobi
Kraken
Gate.io
Bittrex
Bitstamp
MEXC Global
Bitfinex
This is actully a pretty big blow to Hive itself as we all know those Korean pumps that happen lol. This limiting does have some pretty big impacts as we will quickly start seeing that money flow out of exchanges and hopefully into DEX platforms next.
The Internet is Highly Centralized
In order to run a website for a DEX or Crypto exchange you need a domain and you need hosting. Both of these thing can currently be blocked by countries via ISP providers. This also includes VPNs so when you think about it in order to access and use most of your crypto holdings you are trusting that the domain wont be blocked, taken down or removed by authorities. But even that a domain itself can simply be blocked by ISPs or on the government level restricting your access even more to the vital tools and resources you need to gain access to your crypto.
A VPN will only get you so far to bypass this. Take a moment and think about all of the cryptos you have an now you do trades, move it etc. What are the spot gaps for you for potential non use? I bet there's more than one.
What we are seeing take place right now around the world is a major crack down by governments to try and stop crypto and well they do have some pretty nasty tools to go ahead and do just that.
The Battle Fronts
The united states has been filled with confusing tax laws, reports and how to report it. Constant blocks and delays by the SEC and still no real laws passed about the asset class which makes for a lot of grey areas at the moment.
India now outright blocking domains for crypto exchanges sighting money laundering. This might be because of the 1% tax that is charged on their local exchanges. This 1% might not seem like a lot but 1% on every transaction adds up to some serious cheddar at the end of the time in tune of half a billion dollars.
China, random bans and then unbans of crypto mining and other assets in their country. However this seems to have lost it's impact the last time they did it.
Crypto adoption is not going to be an easy thing and there's heavy push back from the powers that be. What they are waiting for is to delay and confuse things long enough until they can have complete oversight of it. We have seen this happen a lot this year with things like USDT which froze accounts based on the DOJ asking them to. Showing us that yet another bottleneck to decentralization has been crushed once again.
