Bitcoin Forum

Russian officials want to pass a bill to stop bitcoin from entering into their country:
http://www.coindesk.com/russian-minister-confirms-plans-to-ban-bitcoin-to-fiat-conversions

Bitstamp seeming to do this from advisory of those officials:
http://www.newsbtc.com/2016/01/18/bitstamp-bans-access-from-russia-temporarily

"It would be better to stop the spread of bitcoin." Says Russian government:
https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/it-would-be-better-to-prevent-spread-of-bitcoin-says-russian-official

This is disconcerting to almost all new adopters to bitcoin. It will be hard to recover if this bill does pass, then more countries will consider doing the same. China since they are communist I would see next to do this if Russia does. That is number 1 and number 2 largest countries in the world.

Is it first ban from Russia to international exchange? I don't remember any other.

bitstamp are the losers in this decision because there are a lot of other exchanges available. so when they ban a country IPs, people from this country will turn to use another exchange and Bitstamp will lose those probable costumers

I don't care much about Bitstamp. It is not very popular in Russia and their market share is much lower than that of their competitors. The most popular Bitcoin exchange in Russia (and the other parts of the former USSR) as of now is BTC-e. It is popular, because it offers anonymity, which the Bitstamp guys can't offer.

I think everyone in Russia use btc-e, so they won't be affected