There was a regulatory meeting Thursday in Russia, this appears to be the result.
Conflicting information on whether individuals can still trade in bitcoin legally. If so, this would leave Russia in pretty much the same boat as China.
The overall impression is, they are going (a some point, not now) to explicitly delegitimize cryptocurrencies as a means to make payments officialy, but not ban / outlaw using the mining tools, or exchanging the bitcoins.
I'm from Russia too, and my understanding that the situation is not that bright: they clearly declare that <<bitcoin is "money surrogate" and cannot be used>>(used as money?).
What they _might_ do at some point is in fact allow trading bitcoin itself just like China. They declare that they are concerned "protecting interests of users of cryptocurrencies", so there is hope.
We'll see, so far this has resulted in bc <-> Russial PayPal clones / alternative operations being (willingly, I'm sure) blocked by that exchange site from the top comment.
Why, should he be making the opposite? It's a government, people, lots of people, have voted FOR it, and support its actions.
Lots of Americans in HN make lots of comments defending the US government and the US point of view. Actually the American point of the view (not just in politics: in life, about startups, society, etc) is the constant undertone on everything written here.
Just because to somebody, as an American, when he champions such things it feels to him like he is stating the "natural law" (instead of man made ethics and opinions) doesn't change that fact.
Conflicting information on whether individuals can still trade in bitcoin legally. If so, this would leave Russia in pretty much the same boat as China.