Bitcoin Forum

Source: https://t.me/zedigital/654 (https://t.me/zedigital/654)

Ukraine's Minister of Digital Transformation said on Telegram that 652 Ukrainian officials declared holding a total of 46,351 BTC. He commented that either they are lying to launder their money, or there are more progressive investors in Ukraine than he thought.

It's been known for a long time that some Ukrainian members of Parliament and other officials invest in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, but the full scale of it has never been known. It's possible that the figure is that big, if there are a lot of early investors, but it could also be like the minister said - an attempt to launder dirty money by presenting them as a profit from Bitcoin investment.

It's possible to buy some old coins that haven't been touched for years and their private key on OTC markets for some premium, transfer them to your own wallet, and then claim that you have owned them for years and even present a signature as a "proof".

46k of bitcoins is an impressive number, and laundering is definitely in the possibilities since corruption in politics is rife, I might be wrong though and that they might just be progressive thinking like what OP says.

I'm not at all surprised that any politician in any country invests in Bitcoin, they consider themselves smarter than most people, and who wants to miss the opportunity to make money, especially in a country where aren't many real opportunities. Tactics with buying private keys with the old balance may make sense for some, especially if it is a country where corruption is at a high level - I guess that with private keys come receipts for the purchase of those same coins.

In any case, this Ukrainian minister has a demanding job to try to find evidence of any illegal activities if he thinks they exist. Otherwise, he must accept that people are simply smart investors, which of course is not prohibited by law.

Bitcoin isn't that anonymous,so those government officials must be really stupid,thinking that they could successfully launder their money by buying BTC.


This seems like a smart move,but I haven't seen people,who are selling old coins inside a wallet+private keys.
I don't think that the Ukrainian government officials are that smart and tech savvy.
They have even declared ownership of the BTC,which is weird.Why would they declare something they want to hide?This doesn't make any sense.

652 officials is a large number. If this is much lower, I wouldn't doubt its truth. But hundreds of them? The numbers make everything a little suspicious.

It is also possible that since officials regularly talk with their fellow officials, they might have discussed Bitcoin and then it simply spreads among the others. But it is still surprising knowing that their Bitcoin holdings amount to almost 3 billion USD. That's a huge amount being held by government officials in a pretty anonymous way.

North Korea and other nations with financial sanctions can run their bitcoin mining rigs. They will do it in secret but they don't lose anything when mining bitcoin. No data or article is available about this tactic but I think some are applying it.

As in my nation, governments, police, banks and laws don't protect locals if they have crypto exchanges and get scammed; or they have trades with people (trade partners) have capital from money laundering.

If they are bitcoin sellers: they will lose their bitcoin to scammers and have to return fiat to police or governments. They only protect people who have fiat stolen by scammers.

I think governments (police) will take over the amount of bitcoin after they arrest scammers. Even they get bitcoin from scammers, they don't give the bitcoin to bitcoin sellers. Take it for themselves. Who knows? It can happen in any nation.

Why should the ownership of coins by government officials, be any different than ownership of public citizens? Does the fact that those people are working for the government, make them more prone to financial crimes or corruption?

Bitcoin has seen phenomenal growth in the last 5 years and this is published widely on social media, so anyone with some money to invest, will skip the low interest rates given by Banks and Bonds and rather invest in something that will beat inflation. (Including government employees)  ::)

That's quite possible. In the media of Ukraine, sometimes there is information about the possession of large amounts of bitcoins by some deputies of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine. So, a few days ago I read that the Urbansky deputy has more than 4000 bitcoins.
 In Ukraine, laws on the regulation of cryptocurrency have not yet been adopted, however, about six different bills in the country's legislative body are very loyal to cryptocurrency, and some of them even establish the absence of taxation on the use and making a profit in cryptocurrency. Probably, Ukrainian officials do not want to complicate their life.

 This is quite impressive that the politicians are holdings such huge amount in Bitcoins.But the main point is due to rise in prices everyone wants a share in profit and moreover politicians have funds available with them that can invest even at high prices to hold for the long term.We have heard many instances before Ukraine has come up with crypto related news related to holdings and bitcoin mining using nuclear power plant of the country.

19 year old Ukrainian politician holding $24 million in Monero (https://www.google.com/amp/s/cointelegraph.com/news/19-year-old-ukrainian-politician-reports-crypto-holdings-of-24m-in-monero/amp)

So we can't say who is holding btc from how long because everyday we came across news where Bitcoin adoption is witnessed.

There is a high chances that the figure is higher than it is stated.
Funny enough, it will be these same officials that will be say publicly that they don't trust bitcoin enough.
So behind close doors, they invest, then openly they say different things.

They are too smart for that.

No matter how they hide the proceeds of crime. I thought it would be found. Bitcoin owners can still be traced because they are not completely anonymous. Then the last news I know, Crypto in Ukraine is not regulated yet. But They will plan to start levying taxes on crypto. It is certainly great that they believe in the future of bitcoin and crypto so they dare to save and buy it.

If these figures are true, then Ukrainians may be one of the largest holders of cryptocurrency in the world. Imagine this. If the few hundreds of officials are holding such a massive amount (0.3% of the circulating supply), then the remainder of the population should be holding at least 10x or 20x of that number. So we can confidentially say that Ukrainians own 3% to 6% of the circulating supply of BTC. This is a massive number and may be higher than the same from other countries such as India and Taiwan.

That is debatable, I'm not really sure how corruption in Ukrainian is, maybe those officials are really into bitcoin investments early that they have accumulated so much.

I agree that bitcoin has a phenomenal run in the last 5 years, but you can't avoid the questions on how a public official, we are talking about members of the parliaments who dabs on bitcoin? I think there could be some red flag here.

But it will take a lot of investigations and blockchain analysis to prove it.

Probably lying to launder money. It's not a small number of coins, don't imagine they'd be sophisticated enough to hide those wallets. Really easy way to suddenly introduce millions of dollars in a suitcase and say, "oh, I just sold all my bitcoin on some marketplace somewhere, thank you very much".

Been seeing a lot of political videos from there of late, by the way;)

You should take into account that Ukrainian politicians and ordinary people do not share the same standard when it comes to business opportunities and, more importantly, the amount of monthly income. The average salary in developed parts of the country is about $450 (https://tradingeconomics.com/ukraine/minimum-wages), but that amount is much lower in less developed parts of the country. Usually in such countries, ordinary people do not have the opportunity to invest anything in risky assets such as Bitcoin, but it would be really nice if some of them managed to buy and save BTC over the years.

Therefore, I sincerely doubt that Ukrainians have approximately close to 3% of all mined BTC, let alone more than that.

I don't get the part about tax evasion
In theory, it could work if they suddenly declared they have 1000 BTC and they just sold them, here are my 60 millions in$ I made them from BTC profits from when I bought with 1$.
But, those reports are annual (https://news.bitcoin.com/57-ukrainian-officials-declared-21000-bitcoins/), in 2018 they had 21 000 BTC so if they acquire more they must have done it a x price, where did that money come from in the first place?

I would understand BTC being used as a mean of hiding bribes any official can basically print a QR code, flash it before the one that should pay the bribe, and then good luck for the police trying to prove that I own that address with all the money and that I demandED those in the first place. But after that, anyone would keep quiet about how many bitcoins they have.


Infidel... ;D

This is the negative impact of one of bitcoin being one of the money laundering tools because of corruption cases so that they are not seen by people, they can live as if they are simple but assets are stored in the form of bitcoin.

I doubt it would really be worth it for them. Financial sanctions can be unforgiving for certain countries but Bitcoin mining would hardly contribute anything to their GDP. It would be tough to mine Bitcoins when your country doesn't even have a stable supply of electricity and your focus is on developing nuclear weapons. Training people for cybercrime is far more lucrative like what some of their APTs are doing.

Probably not. You're ignoring the fact that most of the expendable wealth are concentrated in those with power and the normal citizen probably wouldn't even use Bitcoin. It is not an accurate way to estimate Bitcoin's usage in a specific country.

It seems to me that there are indeed many people owning cryptos in Ukraine, so it's a little bit of both. Surely, some of them probably followed the advice of their lawyers and declared their money as cryptos because you can always say that you bought early on and that's why now you have tons of money. A few years ago, there were already Ukrainian officials making such statements, I think. But there are probably also some people who have cryptos and don't declare them because they don't feel like it, especially since it's not obligatory (https://www.radiosvoboda.org/a/29247836.html). I mean, I was once just travelling in a local marshrutka (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshrutka), and a guy was casually trading coins on Binance there. We have more crypto users than catches the eye.
Since declarations became a thing only years ago, and nobody's asking people to declare their cryptos, an official can always say (without providing any proof) that the cryptos were bought back in 2010 or something like that and that given that there's no crypto legislation in Ukraine, this person simply didn't declare them before.

people in the government (no matter the country) know better than anyone else about the dire situation in the economy or the corruption that runs deep in the banking system. so it is not surprising to see many of them actually chose to have some of their net worth in bitcoin although i am a bit skeptical about the total amount that is reported here.

i don't think the laundry part has anything to do with bitcoin. they are just saying that some of these people who have some large sums of fiat out of nowhere are falsely claiming that it was bitcoin profit.

The Ukrainian government really need to be busy finding out about the behavior of their official who own a lot of bitcoin. If the official is found to have committed an illegal act by buying a lot of bitcoin, the government must be able to prove that this official bought bitcoin from corruption. Money laundering case may be carried out by official of a country at bitcoin, but they are not smart enough because they may forget that bitcoin is not completely anonymous.
If the government cannot prove that its official have been carrying out illegal activities, it mean the owner of bitcoin are very smart people and know about the potential future of bitcoin when they buy it.

this is an incredible amount, how do they get these Bitcoins...
whether all the Bitcoin they got was the result of 'money laundering'. but I do not understand what their reasons are so that they have to confess like this. whether Ukraine will support Bitcoin!

People in the government really like to receive bribes and embezzle funds, but it would very stupid of them to store their wealth in cash or bank accounts, so they get creative and purchase properties for their relatives, open offshore bank accounts, and so on and so on, including investing in Bitcoin. They aren't buying Bitcoin because they have no faith in the economy.

It is an incredible amount and I think everyone in this thread is asking the same question, how did they get those bitcoins, I don't really put too much reliance on my hunch but something tells me that the source of this bitcoin might be of criminal origin and since they are politician and the word corruption is the spouse of the word politician, I am pretty sure that there is something as to how they got those bitcoins.

There is a version that officials declared their non-existent bitcoins in order to explain their future high income. And we all understand where they intend to get these incomes. But to explain the appearance of their income, they will be that they acquired bitcoins at a small price in 2020, and since then bitcoins have grown.
https://t.me/gen_m/1342
And fears are also expressed that when bitcoin rises to a million dollars, these officials will have to seriously fear for their lives since everyone has said how much they own.

I know from personal experience that Bitcoin is very popular in Ukraine among the general population, and I know this from the amount of traffic coming from there to faucets. Today, that percentage is around 20%, similar to the data for Russia, which together make up over 40% of all traffic on faucets and PTC. Of course, some may interpret it differently, but it is certain that there is great interest in cryptocurrencies - but given the purchasing power of citizens, they are trying to reach them in other ways.

I recently had one campaign across one popular PTC site and 18% of all visits were from Ukraine.

https://i.imgur.com/Iep6yCT.jpg

The 652 Ukrainian officials hold a total of 46,351 BTC which is an impressive number.
If the Ukrainian legal authorities want to know if this is money laundering or not they just need to investigate the source of the money for these people to buy BTC, everything will be clear.

Since the bitcoin's blockchain is more or less transparent I do agree, it's possible to identify even from where they got or buy btc from. the perk of having transparent blockchain I guess, rather than untraceable paper money, but if those officials are shady enought they might do some shady tricks but I guess it's just a tip of an iceberg, same with any other countries officials.

I agree to an extent with your post. But what about the possibility that most of the ordinary people acquired Bitcoin, when it was trading at very low prices, especially before 2016? The former USSR region was one of the places where the earliest Bitcoin adoption occurred. BTC-e exchange was based in Kiev during the initial years, before moving their office to Bulgaria. If 652 Ukrainians can have 0.3% of all the Bitcoin in circulation, then I would say that it is quite possible that the remaining 40-42 million may posses at least 3% to 4%.

So how will they explain this if they haven't actually purchased them?
I bought 100 BTC at 4000 and sold them at 60 000 BTC, good, but where did you get those $400 000 and when did you send the money to that exchange?  And there is one bigger problem if the price continues to rise and you don't actually have bought the coins, laws can change with a regime change and you might have to show proof of the ownership, you will have to cling to those fake numbers you claim and never say you sold any as the profit would be enormous and you would have to pay it entirely out of your pocket.

Of course, I don't know that much about the laws in Ukraine but to me, it seems like a really bad way to do it, an easy to trace and debunk way of trying to launder money without actually touching the coins. Want to get away with this easy? Use the dirty money to buy real coins anonymously then send them to a real exchange dump them and here you have it, unless they try to trace every damn coin and ATM receipt your story checks out.

 

US & EU loans to Ukraine well spent. How nice. And they always demand more loans.

An impressive number, what did they do to get 46k Bitcoins? Accept bribes or disperse property they have stolen from the state.
If all the countries have politicians, officials who own Bitcoin like that, they really are getting rich quickly. The rich get richer, and most of them are bad people.
Am I thinking of whether Chinese officials are doing the same thing to Ukrainian officials? China is a developed country with a very large economic scale, bribery has happened before in this country and this activity is more sophisticated than ever.

LOL. I don't know if it is true, but it sounds plausible because after all this is what usually happens with much of the money printed in this money-debt system we have: it ends up inflating the price of financial assets.

Let’s say you’re right and Ukrainians actually bought Bitcoin while its value was only a few hundred $, what percentage do you think kept their coins after 2017? I think few have managed to resist the $20 000 price, which doesn’t mean they haven’t taken advantage of the long crypto winter to re-accumulate - although given average salaries it hasn’t been easy to buy BTC at prices above $3000. In any case, this question may never get an answer, but it would be nice if ordinary people really benefited from Bitcoin.

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A good comparison, but if politicians spent the donated money on buying BTC, at least they have proof of where the money came from. Some might say, well spent money ;)

They're declaring ownership BECAUSE it's money laundering, so that they can justify their spending, millions appearing on their bank accounts, etc.

To be honest if they're that rich, it's time to leave Ukraine.

Well noticed. A significant part of these loans has always been stolen by officials. Moreover, other officials only record this and for some reason cannot find the perpetrators, although this is always documented and easily tracked. Therefore, it is no coincidence that the level of corruption in Ukraine is one of the highest in the world.
The judicial system in this country is especially unique. There they were so worried about the independence of judges that now the judicial system of Ukraine is a state within a state and even controls political processes, canceling any decisions of the authorities at its discretion. Therefore, even the president and the motley legislative body of Ukraine can do nothing with the Constitutional Court and some of the capital's judges, who began to openly make anti-Ukrainian decisions and change the domestic and foreign policy of this state.

It's pure coincidence (it has to be, innit?) Biden's son gets paid wads of cash for being a "consultant" to a couple of most expensive development projects in Ukraine worth hundreds of millions of dollars. I'm sure it's safe to say he achieved it all purely by himself and no corruption whatsoever was involved.

The whole world is coming to terms with the fact that crypto and blockchain technology and its importance. Industries and investors are committing loads of resources towards procuring Bitcoin because its the future.

Russian officials ordered to get rid of cryptocurrency by April 1 2021
More details: https://eadaily.com/ru/news/2021/01/22/rossiyskih-chinovnikov-obyazali-izbavitsya-ot-kriptovalyuty-do-1-aprelya
No one will actually get rid of cryptocurrencies, but will transfer them to their relatives.
When there is data on declaring cryptocurrencies in Russia, it'll make your hair curl ;D

It could be either ways. But holding such amount is very amazing. That's a huge amount of Bitcoin.
The government of Ukraine should investigate to know whether they are lying or saying the truth. Money laundering impoverished the people but if the actually bought it, they should enjoy their investment. That's my take on the his issue.

Politicians, not just in Ukraine, but also on other places, has some premium access to information that makes them good in doing things their way. That also includes investing in Bitcoin and cryptocurrency and traditional investments like Stock market. Well, lucky them because the common man don't have the luxury to get that information, not even a big wallet for them to use for investment. Just try to do your best to get the information on your own here in this forum.

I think it's more of connections due to their position in the government, Give and take of information with the big names especially on business could happening. For normal people, Getting information thru big names would be hard to accumulate but if you are in a high position in the government you could do some ways. Ukraine officials could certainly share the same information about BTC and bagged up when it's not at its peak price. Though it will be hard to tell if they will use it on laundering or in illegal activities. Asking officials to drop public addresses to be verified by the public would be helpful but it wouldn't solve the actual speculations about them.

I'm pretty sure that their government wouldn't push to tax crypto  :P

i guess, this scenario is happening in most countries. if you are a politician, sometimes you are privilege to do a lot of things. anyway, i dont think they will give their btc addresses publicly, and if they will, they will just give one or two, and others are kept secret among relatives. lol
in time, for sure, we will be reading more politicians to be a BTC holder. i believe, a lot of them are already secretly buying. they can actually keep their illegal monies in crypto these days

To be honest, I was quite surprised that the 652 Ukrainian officials holding Bitcoin was very large, knowing that I thought it was possible that officials
from other countries might do the same. But maybe other countries didn't tell the public, state officials are very easy if they want to buy Bitcoin,
because they have a large income. At a Bitcoin price of $ 58k there are still plenty of officials who can buy Bitcoin.  The problem of ordinary people
like me is that it is very difficult to own 1 BTC at the current price.

Quite funny how people no longer trust government officials because of the bad eggs among them (that’s if not all of them are the bad eggs). If this is in my country there is nothing you’re saying to convince the people that they have no plans to launder money, because money laundering has become a norm for government officials, all of them that are going into politics are doing so because they have plans to laundering money, so it’s hard for people to now believe whatever they are going to say whether to cover up their acts or they are being honest, no one wants to believe them anymore. Anyway, how exactly do they plan on verifying whether these officials the coins they claim that the own?

This is a very foolish decision. These officials can simply claim that the Bitcoin addresses are owned by their spouse or children. There is no 100% effective way to link a particular wallet with an individual. In short, the access to the coins will remain with the officials, but they will claim that these are in turn under the ownership of other people. Anyway, at least Russia is not stupid enough to "ban" the ownership of cryptocurrency like India.

Looks like people who issued this order have no clue of the ways crypto works. They must keep thinking it's something similar to a bank account LOL

The source is Telegram. Anyone these days can create a fake Telegram account and post whatever favours them.

I'm not exactly saying that there aren't holdings of BTC from these people (there probably are), all I'm pointing out is the source not being that reliable.

We know Ukranians are notorious for such behaviour, and it is possible that there are many who take advantage of crypto to funnel out their money but it is difficult to prove. I just wouldn't take this Telegram post as proof.

I also always check the information coming from social networks and instant messengers. But this news went all over the Internet, so I don't think it's a fake. And knowing the political situation in Ukraine, such news is not surprising at all. The country has long been divided by oligarchs, and now also by officials who, as it turns out, may turn out to be richer than the first.

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/business/ukraines-civil-servants-report-owning-2-6-billion-of-bitcoin
https://www.investing.com/news/cryptocurrency-news/ukrainians-owns-over-45000-bitcoins-btc-2468997

I've heard this news way back 2017 or 2018 about government officials hodling Bitcoin in undisclosed number and I know that those numbers we got today from Ukraine are not the only numbers since some of them maybe holding other privacy coins.

Yes it is possible but they need to pay huge amount as tax to the government even if the officials managed to find such old coin with private keys for a premium price so I don't think those people will never do such a move. They can convert those bitcoins into third party accounts and get the money back onto their hands.

You shouldn't use such terms as "stupid".
Having declared cryptocurrencies in Russia, officials or their relatives can legally use cryptocurrencies in other countries. They will have a document that proves that the crypto assets were obtained legally.
You can declare some of the cryptocurrencies or not declare it depends on your future plans.

These data are based only on the verification of the electronic declaration of income, therefore, such a statement cannot be true. The political system of Ukraine has no checks and balances, officials just need to make a statement to make it true. No one will ever allow you to check the reality of this data, so for them this is a real opportunity to launder money without any consequences. Moreover, absolutely any amount, since I know that some of the officials included in their declaration the Bitcoins that they allegedly acquired 6 or 8 years ago. I am sure that the real amount of bitcoins in the possession of Ua officials is 10 times less, except for cases when officials invested their illegally obtained money in bitcoin so that in the event of an arrest, no one could confiscate these funds.

This is a very simple task. For starters, you can get Russian user data from major cryptocurrency exchanges such as Binance. If there are coins on the accounts and they were not declared, then they can check and find violations of the law.
Most people do not know how to trade on decentralized exchanges, so tax inspectors will have a lot of work.

It may well be possible. In Ukraine, many are really interested in cryptocurrency and it can be a good way to launder the dirty money of officials, because profits from cryptocurrency in Ukraine are still not taxed. When the relevant law is introduced, it will not be necessary to prove the fact and the sources of the acquisition of the cryptocurrency, taking into account the fact that previously it always had little value, but it will simply be necessary to legalize it by paying a one-time tax.

Ukraine is a very peculiar country, a country in which every law was issued only for the purpose of earning the political elite. The Ukrainian political machine is a machine for earning money ... and ordinary citizens, in any way connected with the cryptocurrency, do not care about this law, since this is just another trick for luring money. The only way to attract the attention of the whole world is to give miners privileges on electricity, given the number of nuclear power plants that Ukraine has.

• Virtual assets in Ukraine: https://www.rada.gov.ua/en/news/News/200320.html ^{[Just read this nonsense]}

Your post is the most correct. Bull's-eye! In Ukraine, there was a case when a parliamentarian announced that he had won his millions in the lottery. And he won the jackpot several times in a row - "lucky". In Ukraine, officials know how to launder money stolen from the state.

Are these things still a new thing or still surprising? No its not and majority of government around the globe would have the same intentions on how they can really benefit out nor launder money and since they do have the power or simply top of the chain in terms of governing rights then its no surprise
that most of them would really abuse this priveledge and make use into other means which is to corrupt or launder money.
Nothing surprising into those numbers and also i wont be surprised again to find more number in coins in next day news.  ;)

The fact that politicians are so rich is unsettling. That many bitcoins is way too much money. It seemed interesting to me. So there is theft in Ukraine.

Obviously the news is alarming, the anti-corruption system used in Ukraine did not stop these officials.

We honestly have a very big monster that is the corruption that makes the nations insecure, giving the privilege to the vicious circle that participates in it.

While investigating more about this case, I found out how the Ukrainian country handles the use of Cryptocurrencies.

What happened next with these officials I could not find anything related.

Ukraine has been a politically unstable country for many years. Their early recognition of Bitcoin was an unexpected advantage. I believe in the world there are many countries where officials own a lot of Bitcoin. I think North Korea and China are two countries where officials own a lot of Bitcoin because these two countries follow the capitalist path. Officials are not allowed to own too many properties because otherwise they will be investigated and have a low credit rating. A few years ago I heard about Chinese officials taking bribes in Bitcoin.

Where I come from, we are the same, politicians cut from the same cloth. My country's own prime minister (ex now) famously made global headlines with billions of dollars stolen from national funds. Big enough when viewed from USD perspective, unimaginable to most people when converted to national currency. His explanation was even easier: he receives unsolicited donations from other countries who just love his policies. Donations!

Waiting for some minister one day to say he bought Bitcoin from Satoshi.