According to regulations, the Ministry of Finance can either re-submit
So Ministry of Economic Development reacts negatively on that draft, says definition of "money surrogate" is too broad, in current redaction that can lead to ban on almost everything (gift cards, loyalty programs, etc.). It's not like they vote for Bitcoin, as RT says in title, seems like they just want more realistic definition. the revised bill to the Ministry of Economic Development, or submit it to the government without changes, enclosing a table of differences on the project. http://rt.com/news/218019-bill-ban-bitcoin-russia/ (English) http://top.rbc.ru/technology_and_media/26/12/2014/549d7fe89a7947847db1c19b (Russian) Anton Nesterov:
Anton Nesterov wrote:
Ministry of Finance of Russia drafted a bill to ban cryptocurrencies with administrative or criminal penalty for mining and other operation. Also they want to censor bitcoin-related websites.
This will come into force in 2015.
http://top.rbc.ru/economics/01/08/2014/940521.shtml (in Russian)
OK, draft is available now: http://regulation.gov.ru/project/17205.html?point=view_project&stage=2&stage_id=13089
Draft bans surrogate money and defines this as currency, including the electronic, used for payments or/and exchange, beside the ones described in federal law (definitely this includes bitcoins).
Emission, creating and distribution software for emission of money surrogates, distribution of information which can be used to emission money surrogates and/or operation with them, operation with money surrogates: 30-50k rubles ($750-1.25k) for citizens, 60-100k ($1.5k-2.5k) for govt officials, 500k-1m ($12.5k-25k) for legal entities.
Also it gives power to the Bank of Russia to censor websites related to the emission and operations with money surrogates.
If any Russians read this: you can add proxy=127.0.0.1:9050 to your bitcoin.conf/litecoin.conf/dogecoin.conf/etc., and this will proxy all your connection via Tor network (of course you need also to run Tor for that).
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