Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, wanted to see concrete cryptocurrency regulations in place and set a deadline of four months. As the deadline is short, it does seem that there won’t be any real rules that will be set.
Vladimir Putin is labeled as being a Bitcoin skeptic. His July 2019 crypto regulations deadline is now in place as it was officially announced on February 27 but there are only few chances that something will happen.
Putin talked to the Council of the Federation of Russia and the Russian State Duma in an attempt to adopt rules that regulate cryptocurrency use. The goal is to promote Russian digital economy. As the country is hit by US economic sanctions, Russia’s economy does struggle.
This Is Not The First Crypto Deadline
Few people expect new cryptocurrency rules to be set by the deadline because the previous July 2018 deadline was simply ignored. That deadline was all about guidelines being put in place for trading, crypto mining, blockchain and ICOs. Nothing materialized.
Vladimir Putin does not believe in Bitcoin. His skepticism appeared because he does not trust Bitcoin being unregulated or banked by a bank. However, his stance did change in the past months.
In 2017 we saw Vladimir Putin warning Russian citizens about the risks that are associated with cryptocurrencies. He mainly focused on the fact that Bitcoin has an anonymous nature and can attract criminals. He stated:
“The risks include opportunities to launder funds acquired through criminal activities, tax evasion, even terrorism financing, as well as the spread of fraud schemes.”
The Central Bank of Russia did echo what Putin said. It went on to state that virtual currencies are just pyramid schemes. The statement was:
“We have seen how bitcoin has transformed a payment unit into an asset, which is bought in order to obtain a high yield in a short period of time. This is the definition of a pyramid.”
While the mention of the pyramid scheme is a far-fetched, it does go to show that Russian officials are not genuinely interested in making it easy for citizens to use cryptocurrencies. There were reports that Russia was interested in buying Bitcoin in order to deal with the sanctions affecting the economy but this was quickly labeled as being fake-news.
