Russia Allegedly Blocks Access to Yet Another Bitcoin Exchange

Following the self-inflicted ban of Bitstamp, Russia-based users cannot access one of the biggest bitcoin exchanges, BTC-e. Notably, the block did not cover all regions of the country as yet. The screenshots provided hereunder show what Moscow-based users may see when attempting to access the website. However, we managed to access both sites from other Russian cities, Saint Petersburg and Krasnoyarsk.

Apparently, Russia continues the prelude campaign for ‘criminalizing’ cryptocurrencies and operations therewith. It is also probably, that in the wake of evident controversies around recent draft laws on money surrogates and statements from Russian ministry of finance, the legal ambiguity around digital currency continues expanding. In this case, a decision on blocking a site may be issued only by Roskomnadzor, however, its publicly available list of banned sites still lacks both BTC-e.com and Bitstamp.net.

Russia still cannot pin down its attitude towards digital currency, however it seriously intends to legalize the blockchain technology, or, to be precise, to maintain its compliance with Russian legislation. However, emergence of other databases like Oracle or Portsql never launched discussions in their regard.

The other possible explanation for banning is ruble’s continuing fall in price caused by oil cheapening and economic sanctions imposed on Russia in the wake of the Ukrainian crisis. The ban could be a way to limit capital outflow from the country.

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