How can mining save strawberry plantations in Kaliningrad?

Bitcoin’s path in Russia is pretty sophisticated. It started with radical actions. For operations with “money surrogates” the draft law 46853 from 10 Martz, 2016 set a fine up to 2.5 mln rubles, 2-4 years’ income deprival or imprisonment up to 7 years (hence, mining was classified as a fairly serious offense).

In January 2018 Vedomosti reported that the Ministry of communications was going to make it legal for residents and companies to mine and set taxation. Moreover, the ministry was going to launch a special identification system for miners. The system was supposed to analysed Internet traffic and electric current transaction structure. Of course, some difficulties could appear. Konstantin Vinogradov from Runa Capital fund said that it is necessary to find a working device but not only to trace energy diversion to prove the fact of mining. It was planned to legalise “money surrogates” in March 2018. Nevertheless, the next time the project appeared only in July. It was decided to replace its discussion to the autumn session of the State Duma.

Mining is to be legalised as entrepreneurship. Thus, miners and cryptocurrency holders will work under already set norms of the tax code. The government does not plan to implement any special laws for cryptocurrency regulation. As the Vice-Chairman of Centrobank Olga Skorobogatova emphasised, the aim of the project (its first version) was to implement the terms.

Arseniy Sheltsyn, the Director of Russian Association of Cryptocurrencies and Blockchain (RACIB), can argue against the wisdom of such a decision: “It is necessary to tax labour results but not a labour process. Hitech centres are being created, the legal frameworks race is going on. It is important for a legal framework to be attractive for complicated calculations market and loyal to it. If we really talk about the leadership of Russia in the digital world, we should be flexible do not trying to gain a pitiful profit from the young market. Such a behavior will prevent its development”. He believes that taxation should be performed at the stage of transferring cryptocurrency into traditional money.

Being sure that the digital economy is the key to the whole country development, some Russian regions are going to mine on the industrial level. For instance, the government of Leningrad region has invited miners (both russians and foreigners) on the decommissioned nuclear station. The governor of the region Alexandr Drozdenko says that administration and Rosatom have approved the project. Kaliningrad region is also ready to develop huge mining enterprises. Anton Alihanov, its governor, suggests all the miners unite into the one large farm. Besides, he emphasises that strawberry production in Kaliningrad will benefit by mining as the plantations need more heat during in winter.

The fighting spirit of miners is also encouraged by the statement of Uriy Pripachkin, the RACIB President, who believes that Russia has enough energy which can be sold to miners. However, Russia does not look like a large mining centre. Especially, after one of the largest in Europe bitcoin farms shut down. The police found it in the abandoned factory in Orenburg. There were powerful devices and memory cards, in total there were 6.000 mining instruments. Criminal proceedings are instituted against two chiefs of the organisation which produced cryptocurrency using stolen electricity. They are accused according to the 165th article of Russian Criminal Procedure Codecs (“Property damage causing by fraud”). Scientists from the Federal Nuclear centre in Sarov were hit too. They tried to mine via the most powerful supercomputers in Russia and were caught.

Bitnewstoday.com follows adventures of mining. The previous materials you can find here. To be continued.