Lodewijk andré de la porte wrote:
That would be a first! Wonder what exactly pushes their buttons. Perhaps just that it's a surrogate? Wouldn't surprise me. Surrogates actually banned since 90s, but nobody knows what money surrogates is, there was no lawful definition, and as far I remember, first time it was used in a letters from Bank of Russia and Prosecutor General which says Bitcoin is surrogates http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/02/09/us-russia-bitcoin-idUSBREA18066201...
Giving the Bank of Russia censorship rights regarding alternatives is pretty pushy, but, soon, "in Russia legal tender is only tender". That probably will work like "we google bitcoin and ban first 20 or more
Funny thing that with such definition they ban anything except ruble, including money in computer games, some payment systems, etc. Russian Duma acts crazy last time, they voted for many crazy bills, and this one will just continue the trend, so there probably no real reason for ban. Bitcoin is not so popular in Russia, it take a really little part in drug deals or anything other, but probably they will attempt to justify the ban with drugs, there is some talks on drugs started last time, which very overestimated the problem. links, repeat every day/week/month", that way it works with drugs or suicides, they banned many doorways, jokes or even slang terms not related to any crime (like an article on boosters from EVE Online, in Russian community it's called "drugs", or latest GitHub ban for an article which recommends you to commit a suicide with starting WWIII, using nanomachines from science fiction, making a nuclear bomb from your own body, etc.) because of that. -- https://komachi.github.io GPG key: 0CE8 65F1 9043 2B11 25A5 74A7 1187 6869 67AA 56E4 https://keybase.io/komachi/key.asc