Hello my fellow steemitians! It has been some time since I have updated you with situation in Russia. On May 22, Russian the State Duma (aka parliament) approved draft laws in the first reading on cryptocurrencies and crowdfunding. Unfortunately, there are no positive changes from drafts we reviewed previously. At the beginning of the year, there was a fight between Ministry of finance that was positive on crypto and Central Bank that was all negative. It looks like Central Bank is winner. Let us look at cons and pros of new laws.

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Doomsday cancelled or pros of new laws

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In general, laws are not all that prohibiting and doesn’t aim to cast cryptocurrencies out of Russia. I can actually see some pros:

• The law gives definitions for coins and tokens and makes that a legal property (not a currency). This makes crypto related business legal. The government will stop considering it as shadow economy, tax evasion and etc.
• Smart contract are legal agreements in a form of computer code.
• ICO and Mining are legal. With many limitations that make them useless, but at least legal.
• Laws are not complete, so there is plenty of room to improve them.

Death penalty replaced by exile or cons of new laws

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Laws are terribly inaccurate, contradict with other laws and each other, and break existing practice… It would take the whole day to form the full list of bad things. Instead, I will just give you my opinion on the most critical items.

• Cryptocurrencies are not currencies. You can’t pay for anything in bitcoin.
• It is illegal to exchange cryptocurrencies between each other. You can only buy/sell tokens for fiat currencies. It denies all existing world practice and prohibits exchanges in particular. It also pretty much destroys all their efforts to regulate ICO. Who will participate in token ICO when smart contracts are not used?
• Mandatory KYC and centralized wallets. You can’t use your own wallets, hardware wallets, MEW and etc. There should be “crypto exchange operators” as legal entities who provide own wallets after verifying your id. Sounds like a madness, doesn’t it? I don’t mind mandatory KYC on exchanges or ICOs, but this is just too much.
• They try to regulate crowdfunding and pretty much prohibit it. Non-qualified investors will be able to participate in ICOs, but the amount of money they can invest will be limited for a single ICO and total amount per year (exact numbers are being discussed).
• The idea of these laws was to regulate crypto, make it a part of economy and attract foreign investments into Russian projects. These laws failed all tasks. Not only foreign investors will lose interest in investing in Russian projects, Russian investors will also lose the ability to invest in foreign projects without violating own laws.

All in all Russian government rarely issue good (or at least working) laws from the first try. No one can predict where the outcome lies. We’ll see what happens next. So what do you think about these laws? How crypto is regulated in your country?

Disclaimer

I’m not a financial of any kind. I encourage you to check all information yourself and make decision only based on your own opinion. All articles are created for solely entertainment purpose.

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