Bitcoin Forum

http://ria.ru/economy/20140801/1018486952.html

My rough transalation:

Currently the emission of financial surrogates is forbidden in Russia. But the definition of a "financial surrogate" does not exist in the legal framework.

Russian Finance Ministry plans to prohibit the usage of financial surrogates, including digital currencies. The suggested law can already be found on governmental websites. Finance Ministry claims that "virtual currencies" have a lot of shady uses. The anonymous nature of those surrogates attracted purchasers of illegal good and money launderers, claims MinFin.

The suggested law will prohibit both the emission and the transactions in these currencies. Using them as a form of payment, exchange for fiat, and even accessing websites that facilitate these transactions will be forbidden.

Dear Russian friends: Is this the end of bitcoin in Russia?

When China bans bitcoin, it goes into freefall, when Russia bans it I suspect most people will just shrug their shoulders and say "so what?" Why should the bitcoin community give a toss about a country with half the GDP of Italy and a criminal as it's leader?

That being said, I could also see a positive effect for bitcoin, in that half of the dodgiest BTC sites out there are being run by anonymous Russians (such as btc-e.com), we will be well rid of them.

We get this Russia/China banned Bitcoin spam a lot and it's never actually true, even the mainstream networks are starting to get themselves informed about the subject, of course they never admitted they were wrong in the first place.

It's a serious threat to the bit coin ecosystem if Russia or China decide to switch off their servers.

I wonder if this applies to all the Russians mining with bitfury ASIC's.

No, this is the same news as China ban bitcoin for 1000th time  :D
Russians want BTC.. the whole world wants BTC, it's just government officials who sometimes don't like it.

Give us a break, Russia is of zero positive significance to the bitcoin community or the currency.

Well this is bullshit , it has notting to do with bitcoin , but simply the national currency laws...
I was in croatia this weekend at Lost Theory frestival http://www.losttheoryfestival.com/index.php/tickets and yes they accept bitcoins.
all shop owners accept euro's but thats FORBIDDEN by law so when inspection came they only accepted Kuna's the offishal currency of Croatia.
So you can say that in croatia they ban euro's .......
Its not very effective and nobody is taking it serious.
The same goes for bitcoin it is Iligal by default but nobody cares!
Because of it state in croatia evrybody loves it , no taxing , etc nobody cares about government rules.
Thay just came out of a war in 1995 , they dont have people who need the why of btcoin explained.....
 

Except that 90% of network hashing power is produced by hardware based on BitFury chip invented by russian.

In russia anything NOT rubble is BANNED....
the bitfury chips also does not make sense.
KMC does not use them for example , and nobody thake's the non rubble ban seriosly , coruption solves this problem
If you want to do someting you need to bribe people thats how it works.

Russia could not provide decent facilities for the Winter Olympics, would a Gov't that broken even have a chance of effectively "banning" BTC?

Its not made into a law yet, but it would be. Typical of all bankers. They would rather ban it then deal with it. It makes me wonder if Webmoney would be banned under the same law.

What so they are going to uninvent their chip? or restrict it? you think there are not a zillion KnC's out there drooling to fill that void? get real....

I am not sure what you point is, but if I had to assign "zero significance" label I'd rather assign it to the zillions that are just drooling than to someone who actually invented the best mining chip out there.

You are attaching way to much significance to mining speeds. The bitcoin network at current transaction levels could still be happily mined on personal PC's let alone GPU's or ASIC's, all the mining 'arms race' has done is alter who gets the benefit of mining, it's of little intrinsic value to the bitcoin network at this stage of it's growth, it's a completely artificial phenomenon, ie "zero significance"

China, Vietnam, Russia ... all those current and ex-communist countries are eager to ban bitcoin, that says something.

What it says is the (non-democratic) state believes it can control everything. They will get a harsh lesson in the reality of crypto when they miss
the chance to get their share (for their people of course!  :P) of the worlds greatest wealth tsunami.

Bring on the summary executions, then.