Bitcoin Not Threatening Financial System, Will Not be Banned Say Russian Officials

15.01.2017

Bitcoin currently poses no risk to the Russian financial system, the country’s deputy finance minister Alexei Moiseev said.

As reported by the state-owned news agency TASS, Russia’s Ministry of Finance, despite its earlier efforts to ban bitcoin, is now adopting a wait-and-see approach towards the cryptocurrency.

“All of this does not pose much of a danger to the public, as it has not taken on a mass character that could pose a threat to our financial system right now… In the future, it could possibly emerge given that it is not regulated,” Moiseev said earlier this week.

Last summer the Ministry said it was going to allow Russia’s residents to buy cryptocurrency for the purpose of reselling, exchanging and using outside the country. The same proposal suggested mining would be considered issuance of currency, and therefore banned.

Even though presently there are no visible threats from cryptocurrencies, Moiseev concedes such threats could appear in the future.

“So far, we decided just to watch carefully how it is developing. We decided that the Central Bank and the Federal Financial Monitoring Service should monitor cryptocurrency for Russia’s economic security. So far, these agencies believe that there is nothing critical in it,” he said.

More notably, the much-publicized and long-deliberated bitcoin ban by the Bank of Russia will not be pursued any longer, the bank’s deputy chairwoman Olga Skorobogatova revealed.

Russian authorities have treated the Bitcoin phenomenon with caution, while Russia’s Central Bank has received a number of proposals for creating a Russian national cryptocurrency.

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Tags: regulation, Russia