BitMEX CEO, Arthur Hayes, said in an interview on the Venture Coinist podcast that India and China may be the first to stop using hard cash in the economy, a move that would push people into using digital currencies.
,
Hayes spoke at length on the long term prospects of bitcoin. It was when he was asked about his view on the long term development of bitcoin that he made the comment on China and India. Hayes said,
In terms of vision, financial privacy will be dead in 5 years because, if you go to China and you need to buy, say, a drink at a bar, most places don’t take Renmibi or cash. You pull out your phone, you get your WeChat pay app and scan a bar code. However, it’s a centralized company, Tencent, that has data on all these payments….the last frontier is money…I think China and India are going to be the first to do it but every goverment, whether the west or the east, will ban cash in the next five years…at that point people are going to discover what financial privacy really means.
To Hayes then, it is when people realize how much control the government could have over financial transactions is when Bitcoin adoption will really take shape.
However, reports are now circulating that Indian authorities are looking to completely ban cryptocurrencies, a development that would greatly hurt innovation and the growth of cryptocurrencies in the nation.
