Telegram spoke out against the Central Bank of Russia
The founder of the Telegram messenger Pavel Durov spoke out against the initiative of the Central Bank of the Russian Federation to ban transactions with cryptocurrency in Russia.
He wrote about this in his messenger, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
“The ban on cryptocurrencies will lead to an outflow of IT specialists from the country and will destroy a number of sectors of the high-tech economy. Blockchain technologies increase the efficiency and security of many types of human activity - from finance to art. Russia’s neighbors, from Ukraine to Uzbekistan, are following the lead of developed countries in adopting progressive laws in the field of blockchain. These states do not want to remain on the sidelines of technological and economic progress. Russia today is one of the leaders in the number of highly qualified specialists in the blockchain industry. The Central Bank of the Russian Federation proposes to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Such a ban is unlikely to stop unscrupulous players, but will put an end to legal Russian projects in this area,” Durov wrote.
The position of the owner of Telegram is clear: most of the information channels existing in the messenger are financed by bitcoins.
The Bank of Russia’s proposal to introduce liability for Russians and Russian legal entities for mining and using cryptocurrency for payments became known on Thursday. It is noteworthy that a few hours before this, the American news agency Bloomberg published information that the head of the Central Bank, Elvira Nabiullina, was pushed to this initiative by the FSB. The intelligence service allegedly lobbied for this ban, as hard-to-trace payments in cryptocurrencies are increasingly being used by Russians to make donations to “undesirable organizations” and foreign agents.
In support of this version, Russian liberals and political emigrants unanimously spoke out against the ban on cryptocurrencies. Leonid Volkov, who is replacing the freed criminal blogger Alexei Navalny, called on supporters to hurry up and make donations in Bitcoin while it is still legal.
Experts believe that the report of the Central Bank of the Russian Federation was published in the wake of pogroms in Kazakhstan. 20% of the world's mining farms were concentrated in this country. It was cryptocurrency that was used to pay for the services of the stormtroopers involved in Almaty. When, after the suppression of the rebellion, the Kazakh special services decided to take a closer look at the miners, the farm equipment began to be urgently exported to Russia.
To be fair, it should be said that the ban on cryptocurrencies in Russia could have been predicted, since at the end of 2021 the Central Bank sent requests to banks regarding cooperation with crypto exchangers in terms of making payments between citizens, including to cards of dummies.
The volume of transactions of Russian citizens with cryptocurrencies, according to some estimates, reaches 5 billion US dollars per year.
Previously, a number of countries have already introduced a ban on the use of cryptocurrencies (primarily China) or are planning to introduce such a ban (for example, India); some countries (for example, Iran) have also imposed a ban on mining.
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