Crypto market Russian style or a new version of the bill on digital assets

The new edition of the Russian cryptocurrency law abandoned “incomprehensible bitcoins” and “meaningless mining”, because these concepts do not fit into the country’s economy.

Everything that we don’t understand, we don’t need. It seems that work on the bill “On Digital Financial Assets” in Moscow is taking place under this motto. At least this is the impression one gets after an interview with Anatoly Aksakov, Chairman of the State Duma Financial Market Committee.

“These incomprehensible bitcoins cannot be “grown” into the Russian financial system, so we decided that we don’t need them at all,” Aksakov shared the process of working on the bill. After such a refusal to define cryptocurrency as such in the law, it was necessary to refuse to introduce the definition of “mining” into the legal framework. 

According to the chairman, in the legal system prescribed in the new version of the law, there is no need for such a concept as “mining.” In his opinion, whether such concepts need to be introduced into the regulatory framework in principle should be decided by the tax inspectorate, and therefore the issues of taxation of miners are absent in the new legislative document.

This is despite the fact that back in early October the same Aksakov was sure that they make very good money from mining and it must be taxed, and the bill adopted in the first reading recognized mining as a business activity and, therefore, prescribed taxation of the process of mining cryptocurrency for both individuals and legal entities. 

Why legislators abandoned their intentions to dot the i’s remains unclear. What innovations the law preparing for the autumn session will contain, one can only guess. The terrain is changing literally before our eyes.