Bitcoin Forum

The Russian prime minister has claimed that Russians collectively hold more 10 trillion rubles($130b) in cryptocurrencies like bitcoin. Lots of Russians probably bought bitcoin when it seemed like the ruble was going to nosedive due to the expected sanctions at the early phases of the war while some are buying cryptocurrencies to be able to get money out of the country

Note: This is a claim
Source: https://cointelegraph.com/news/russians-collectively-hold-130b-in-crypto-prime-minister-says

These news is weeks old, and it would help if you include the sources and show in your title that it is a claim.

I read through this article (https://cointelegraph.com/news/russians-collectively-hold-130b-in-crypto-prime-minister-says) and I'm more interested in knowing how the government identified who is opening wallets, at what age and how much they are transferring. Even if they used centralized exchanges with custodial wallets, they have to just pass on the information to the government directly as soon as they gather it, for them to be able to monitor user address.

I think that due to the large-scale war unleashed by Russia in the center of Europe, its already obvious military defeat in Ukraine, the application of harsh international sanctions and the need to pay Ukraine the material damage caused by this war, the cryptocurrency reserves of Russian citizens will begin to decline rapidly.

 In the context of austerity and the need to prevent capital flight abroad, I do not think that cryptocurrency will be legalized in Russia. Rather, on the contrary, changes will be made to the existing law on digital assets, which will tighten the ownership of cryptocurrency. Difficult times lie ahead for the citizens of Russia. Well, everyone will have to pay for the arranged genocide of the Ukrainian people and for a very long time.

No doubt with cryptocurrency as best investment assets and not come from usually investor but also many politician interested with bitcoin and altcoin as future investment assets. But better when giving some information exactly holding more 10 trillion rubles($130b) have source information link, will make some member here believe with your statement about there have Russia person hold bitcoin assets with higher amount, become worth when around countries believe with bitcoin as best investment way and make price will back higher.

Wow that is lot of rubles actually. I’m not surprised with the numbers considering the bitcoins trend. Since ruble is falling badly against USD the number could be different at the time of publication or calculation. Most of them might have identified with exchangers and bank transfer to the crypto accounts.

I don’t think their government has any issues with such amount being invested in the crypto. After war situations even escalated to another level, like we have crypto we have secured funds (May be?). Like we do Gold in the crisis.

I feel you. This amount is quite huge even for a country as big as Russia. It would have been better though had they not announced this since it maybe because of this being publicized that major centralized exchanges are now banning Russian people from using their services. And just a while ago, I have also read a post saying that binance has also went and took this banning thing a bit further by banning some relatives of Russian people that they can find despite it having nothing to do or not even being in the country of Russia instead. And so, I guess crypto really isn't something that we should see as an all around solution but instead, one of the other alternatives to secure funds.

It's a bit funny really, how politicians in Russia are caught between banning Bitcoin because it's something they cannot control in the economy and allowing people to use Bitcoin because it takes some of the pressure of sanctions off of the average Russian citizen. In Putin's style of authoritarian government, they like to have maximum control of peoples lives when possible, so they can exert all kinds of pressure - like freezing bank accounts, if it looks like somebody will not support them. It makes sense for the average person there to use Bitcoin because they are banned from the rest of the financial system, unless they want to trust some rather shady banks in other countries and the Ruble certainly won't go as far.

This is only from transactions that are known..... those transactions that went through Russian Exchanges. There are a lot of people that are earning Crypto currencies online and people that are receiving bitcoins and other Crypto currencies through P2P methods.  ;)

The only time when bitcoins can be linked to Russian people, is when it touched regulated centralized services... or when those bitcoins are spend on products and services that link those customers to Russian citizens.  ;)

I wonder what is going to happen once this war is over...... will we see a sudden dump ....or will it be a slow dump over a longer period.  ???

Centralized exchanges would always work in this way, you can't use them and not expect to be censored, locked out of your funds, banned/account blocked for one reason or the other, even if you are not from Russia, and even if this war didn't happen, as long as you use centralized exchanges and store your funds in them, the funds are not yours, and they can pull up one policy against you at absolutely anytime, and you lose your funds, not to even talk of hacks. Overall Russian citizens who use Bitcoin/crypto should stay away from centralized exchanges, at least for now, if they want to buy and sell crypto they should do so through p2p outside of a centralized exchange.
Or no dump at all.

The war hasn't made a big impact over the market of Cryptocurrencies. Start of the war there is decline in the market and further the gradual growth happened reaching the price from which it dropped down. Further several steps were taken by the world countries to keep Russia isolated from the rest of the world. By the time usage of cryptocurrencies increased and this gave good awareness among the global population as everyone were looking for regular updates on the war. So, this time when war gets ended there won't be much of deviation in the market.

Even if I don't believe this kind of news without a proof, I'm nearly convinced that's true since the governments like Russia know everything about their citizens. Previously, we had a Binance scandal wherein the CEO sold the personal data of the Russians to Putin. Now that.

But, do they? I'm sure most still use centralized exchanges, even though they recently got censored by Coinbase (https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/7/22965605/coinbase-russian-sanctions-address-blocking).

I don't see it as a lot of money for a country with a population that large.
There are about 145 million people living in Russia so it's only about $1000 a person.
Obviously most people hold $0 and a few hold $billions.
Then you have all the scam exchanges (yobit and similar) all the scam casinos operating out of there. Add in all the money the state sponsored Russian ransomware gangs took in and it gets up there.

Russia also has (had? a lot  have fled) a lot of really smart tech people. How many of them are sitting on 1000s of dollars of crypto? It does add up.

And a big question, does that number include Russians who are no longer in Russia? Ex pats who are living elsewhere.

-Dave

Is $1000 per capita not a lot, though? It's 7.5% of the total crypto market capitalization (if we take the total marketcap from a website like Coingecko). I think it's a very significant amount if it's actually true, but I have no idea how this could be calculated because I don't think Russians would actively report their crypto holdings to their government which is not very crypto-friendly and where cryptos are sort of in the gray area. By the way, about the $1000 per capita: if we divide the total marketcap by the total population of Earth, the number is $220 per capita. So the number for Russia is significantly above that.

The death toll from this war on both sides is what sanctions can not bring back to life, no matter how severe the sanctions are going to be. Putin must face genocide persecution if he escapes being killed in the war.



How is that possible? How will Binance know accounts of Russian relatives? Or did this ones submit next of kin to Binance on opening the accounts? I do not think it is true. It is a rumor.

It seems to me that it is very difficult to make up an exact number of wallets by country, so the amount given doesn't mean anything  :(

The real number is probably much bigger as you should keep in  mind that that estimate (and that's what it is, nothing else) includes all crypto currencies and Russians are very active on the crypto market, both as investors and as developers of various altcoin projects. I mean, just take a look at Russian local board, which is by far the most active board on the forum, despite the fact that they have to use VPN to ban it.


My guess is that those persons went through KYC on their platform so Binance didn't have much issues connecting them with Russian government officials.


Think again, its true.

They are just showing to us that there is a safe haven .. an escape from the sanctions ... that there is a solution around them . not just showing certain numbers for nothing , could be mean they are holding nothing bbut bullshit , could be a serious one as well as they are planning to accept cryptocurrency as a payment method for the gas & oil exports.

What an extraordinary way in the middle of crypto community uncertainity. wish just it would happened.

Oh, apologize but you are so very wrong with that calculation. In Russia, there live about 145 million people but the most important is to calculate the population in Moscow and Saint Petersburg because outside of these cities, there is no life in Russia. The population of Moscow is 12.7 million and in Saint Petersburg - 5.5 million persons. To summarize, the number we got is - 18.2 million - $8000

Okay, I had fun with calculation, let me tell you something:

• 73 percent of the total adult population of the country, had wealth under 10 thousand U.S. dollars in 2020 - Source: Statista (https://www.statista.com/statistics/482573/russia-population-by-average-wealth/)
• More than 17 million Russians, or about 12% of the total population, are cryptocurrency owners - Source: tripleA (https://triple-a.io/crypto-ownership-russia/) Believe me, majority of them will be from Moscow.
• 0.2 percent of Russian adults own more than one million USD - Definitely they live in Moscow and Saint Petersburg.

You may ask, why is this person mentioning only two cities? Because the Federal budget funds Moscow and Saint Petersburg while collecting the taxes from all cities.

Also, rule N1: Never trust the statistics of Kremlin!
In Russia, rich people are rich because of their governments, honest persons aren't that rich. Ask yourself, why aren't there any billionaires or millionaires against the war? Against the Putin? Because they benefit from corruption and nepotism. In a more democratic country, they would be fucked.

---

What if the west bans bitcoins and for the supportive reasons we all give up on it and move on new cryptocurrency? Russia will be left with bitcoins that have zero value in Roubles. They still don't analyze the importance of West economics and put too many hopes in China. No, China will only use Russia if any, they won't feed and keep alive Russia.

I really doubt this data point, because this data would only be formed using the bank transactions of Many Russians which have added their money into the exchanges or wallets like coinbase for purchasing bitcoin, it will largely exclude information of those who have held it on a private key wallet and have received the bitcoins from some other method. Because it's impossible for Russian authorities to differentiate which wallets belong to Russians. and to be honest the private key holders must be the ones having the major chunk. As per an estimate done a few months back only 6% of total bitcoins are there on exchanges so calculating it that way $130B might just be 5-10% of the total Iceberg.

Crypto showed signs of decline before the war occurred, but the protracted war caused a global energy crisis and the world economy was affected by the war. So I think the war has more or less really affected the market today.
If the war ends, I don't dare say the market will grow strongly but surely the market will be much better than now because then the world economy will be somewhat stable.

Although its pure speculation that could be what they are going by, or something similar.
i.e. all the exchanges that reported to them came to $13 billion. So multiply by 10 and come up with $130.
Since they will not say how they got the number, if we do believe it to be true, then it's as likely a scenario as any.

-Dave

This Is huge especially from a country everyone is trying to distance themselves away from even so many crypto affiliated companies, I think right from time Russia has been interested and involved in the digital world so am not surprised that at this moment they are holding that amount.
But what does this signify, firstly we have to note that by this it means Russia are a crypto-Currency crazy country and this leads me to ask does sanctioning a country even it’s innocent citizens from carrying out their crypto-currency activities.

We all thought about it and it's no secret so they have an option to avoid sanctions. Or not actually avoid it but an alternative that has been there sleeping and they've not noticed it before.
But now, that they're in an economic downturn, this is what they've leaning on and any country can do that. That's actually a big money that they've got in reserve on crypto.

Whether the Russians bought crypto as a counter measure to protect their wealth against a supposedly nosediving ruble, these guys presence can't not be ignored! It's just unfortunate that what's happening at the moment has their leader painting a bad name for their country but otherwise we have whales 🐋  up north that can contribute to cryptos growth...possibly what is lacking atm.

even if centralized exchanges have people's data, how does the russian government have this information? we all know that most centralized exchanges are unlicensed and the owners are anonymous people so how did the russian government get all this information? Will the Russian government keep demanding that anonymous exchanges provide data on Russian customers and even non-Russian customers? besides that I always heard the Russian government talking bad about bitcoin and I well remember them saying that they had china as a partner in case they cut swift, the russian government doesn't like bitcoin


the price of bitcoin is already falling at a frightening level, we have dropped to $34700

This is bad indeed. It is like visiting the sins of the parents on the children. These children may not be in support of what their parents are doing. They may even have hated Putin because of the war he caused but they are now here being punished for what they hate. The damage Putin has caused with this war is very devastating. Putin should be made to suffer all this and not innocent people associated with him by blood or job. Also all this is not good for the image of Binance. They are going to lose customers because of invasion of privacy.

They simply ask the owners to give them data, and Russians already did that with Binance who wholeheartedly gave them what they asked for, and same thing will happen when your government asks them for data about you. It's just a matter of time before all centralized exchanges start sharing all the data about their customers to the governments on the regular basis.


From where you get that, that owners of centralized exchanges are anonymous? Simply google who is the owner of Binance, FTX, Kucoin, Coinbase and I am sure that you will realize that they are not anonymous at all and are all registered somewhere.


Dunno, for me that's not frightening level all. I mean, less than a year ago bitcoin was even lower and then few months later it reached new all time high. If anything. its a chance to accumulate more bitcoin.


Somehow I doubt that they hate Putin as thanks to them their parents became rich and powerful that enables them comfortable life. Don't worry, they are not some random poor kids that will be affected greatly with it and on top of that they got crash course on why its not smart to rely on centralized exchange.

That is a large amount of crypto currencies held by just one country. I wasn't aware that Russia had such kind of wealth prepositioned into cryptos before the war. Not a bad idea to be honest. Putin must have anticipated large scale of sanctions against Russia and help to prepare his country to go around them in some kind of form. International bank accounts and super yachts where very quickly seized by the western countries, but with crypto currencies it is much harder to block them. The only question is now if Russia would like to sell all those crypto coins quickly, who would buy them and in which currencies would they be able to sell. Receiving large amounts of Dollars or Euros wouldn't help much Russia right now, because they can't spend them.

they might, but I am not sure what good that does in a country where you can't really buy your basics with crypto. Will they hand over that crypto to the government that can in return finance the war through crypto? Will the holdings eleviate the troubles of average people imposed by sanctions? No, no it won't so this dosen't mean much.

This is what 5th generation of warfare is i.e. spreading misinformation largely through digital media. Right now Russian rubble is at its highest values at-least in one year, today 1 Russian rubble equal 0.015 USD. I don't understand the reason for putting money in bitcoin when rubble is doing so good? May be President Putin or someone from his team may answer that.

That’s not useful though. Considering the current situation in Russia these funds either will be forced to be withdrawn in Russian bank accounts and use for the war or May be Putin will simply threaten to ban crypto if the people of Russia don’t do it. That’s enormous money but it’s useless as Russia is going through worst vertical of the time. I feel sad for Russians actually. So many of them were involved in the crypto space and now the situation is like they have it but they don’t have it!! What would they do if the ban comes in as result of deteriorating financial situation.

That's right which is why experienced people have always opted for p2p transactions or decentralized exchanges. The thing about this though is that not everyone has access to good p2p trading platforms or reputable enough individuals to be trusted which makes depositing and withdrawing or exchanging fiat a bit more tedious or impossible without these centralized exchanges or custodial wallets. The worse part about banning is not getting your funds locked inside an exchange since people barely store huge amounts on exchanges nowadays. Instead, the thought of not being able to transact and exchange fiat to crypto or reverse is what makes this pretty upsetting.

This is the same question i was thinking, how would the government come to an assumption that Russians are holding $130 billion worth of cryptocurrencies when majority will be trading from exchanges that are not even regulated and there are users that mine the coin. The government can get the data from the exchanges that are functioning in Russia.

They are just estimating here, I don't think they have the resources to get the full picture of crypto holdings of their people. Based from the article itself, they mentioned that it came from various estimates, it means, they don't have the precise figures. But even if this number is just an estimate, it means, Russians are into crypto especially during this war as they are finding options on how to save their money or how to move their money without facing so much trouble. We can't blame them because right now, the situation needs quick thinking on how to secure your assets safely and cheap. Their government may also fast track crypto regulations as they would want to get money from this market as much as possible, for additional sources of income.

 ???

how many exchanges are there? the answer is simple:

there are 307 exchanges.

source: https://coinmarketcap.com/rankings/exchanges/

of these 307 exchanges that exist, how many do you know the owners? less than 10? or 20? the reality has always been that exchange owners are anonymous, look at yobit? do you know who owns yobit? I doubt anyone knows who the owners of yobit are


this is a dangerous zone, if the price drops lower than that, it reaches $30,000 and keeps falling then it can go down to $20,000 so it is a dangerous zone

By name I know only two, Sam Bankman from FTX (even him I had to think hard to remember) and CZ from Binance but not because its hard to find the rest, but because I don't care who is behind them.


Just because you or me don't know who is behind some exchange doesn't mean that owners are anonymous, you are mixing those two terms. Speaking of that, I also don't know who is the owner of my bank and he certainly can't be anonymous. You see, even shitty centralized exchanges like Yobit are registered somewhere by someone, and in the case of Yobit that place is Panama.


Honestly I never bothered to check who is behind Yobit but since you asked I googled it up a bit and it took me like one minute to find out that Yobit founder is a guy named Pavel Krymov (known for bunch of other scams beside Yobit) while current CEO is iyoi tobi (https://www.linkedin.com/in/yobitceo/).

That’s not that bad, I mean I expected more to be fair because they have a top heavy level of rich in their nation, just like USA for example, and that usually ended up being thrown into bitcoin because of all the sanctions.

This is the reason, I assumed that at least this much would have been in crypto in order to both avoid possibly of it getting confiscated by anyone, your bitcoins are your own and nobody could take them from you but at the same time I expected it to be lower because with the sanctions I assumed they would have sent these to fiat of another nation like UAE or whatever to keep alive for a while during the war but I guess they didn't need that.

They simply use the public to take their money and that is why the top is so heavy. The difference between the USA and the Russian rich is that the Americans use the liberal laws to use the cheap labor (cheap is comparatively used here versus their standard of living) and pay very little taxes and just be an "evil corporation" that way, whereas Russians literally steal money from the public, and they are corrupted and they use bribery and other forms in order to get rich.

I believe it's equally bad, but one of them have democracy at least. This 130 billion for example is a lot of money, but definitely not clean money if you ask me, probably there for money laundering, at least most of it.

I don’t know how true the figures are about the presence of 130 billion dollars worth of cryptocurrencies in Russian citizens, but in any case, this figure will soon change very sharply in the direction of its decrease. This will be facilitated by the current war of Russia in Ukraine. Regardless of the outcome of this war, life in Russia will become very difficult, and if the war is defeated, which is most likely, this country will turn from a superpower into a third-rate country with a high level of poverty and other negative processes that accompany this.
Many will leave Russia, and it will be easier for those who own large amounts of cryptocurrency. Whoever remains will be forced to spend their cryptocurrency on a more expensive life.

Its not suprising at all. Russia is one of the biggest bitcoin holder, infact all major economies including USA, China and europeans hold big reserves of bitcoin and possibly some of the hidden treasures of bit coin are deliberately held by anonymous individuals, who actually are waiting for the true rise of bitcoin economy. Who knows they are no other than Putin or maybe CIA.
But I feel bad for both common ukrainians and common russians

These days if any government wants to go against the powers and regulations of USA, then they need to have a heavy investment in bitcoins so that they can survive without the dollars. As more and more countries will realize this, they will invest more in bitcoin, and eventually, the bitcoin will go much higher and the dollar will become weaker. This may take some time, a decade maybe, but this will happen for sure.

First thought: wow, that's a lot. Second is how does the Russian government know all about this? This data is only available if the crypto owners themselves disclose what they have to the government, or they are in cooperation with exchange owners themselves. Anyway, that $130bn in crypto can move a lot in the whole market, and goes to show how much money the Russians have even in crypto alone. It's ironic how the country is anti-crypto for some time and have their citizens amass that amount.

A country that is anti-crypto but has $130 billion in crypto, is ironic and in contrast to the regulations provided by the Russian government.
The Russian prime minister claims that collectively Russia holds more than 10 trillion rubles (130 USD) in cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and several other altcoins. The source of the figure is based on various estimates stating that they have data on more than 10 million young people who opened crypto wallets and have transferred large sums of money that exceed 10 trillion rubles ( $130 billion ).
However, Russia has been slow to adopt cryptocurrencies and the rules about using cryptocurrencies are not clear. Russia that became a crypto-skeptic country and urged other countries to ban the use of bitcoin.