The Indian government is not "banning" cryptocurrencies.

Indian media houses, please stop this bad journalism.

It doesn't have the capability to "ban" cryptocurrencies. That was the whole point of cryptocurrencies in the first place, the key word being "decentralized".

Yes, I realise that the BTC, which is the most popular at the moment, is not truly decentralized. However, I'm pretty sure the Indian government is still incapable of taking control. Pretty sure for them a ban is equivalent to a DNS block on bitcoin.org. Guess what else it tried banning some time ago :)

Quoting Jaitley, "The government does not recognize cryptocurrencies as legal tender or coin and will take all measures to eliminate the use of these cryptoassets in financing illegitimate activities or as part of the payments system".

It's not a 1000 rupee note. It was never a legal tender to begin with. It hasn't been unrecognized, it was never recognized by the government in the first place!