The Russian government will oversee all the country’s crypto mining farms if a recently proposed bill is passed. The bill requires all the country’s data centers to report all their activities to the government, and this includes mining farms. According to the Ministry of Digital Development, Communications and Mass Media, the proposed bill finally seeks to police its data centers. It describes data centers as an establishment that hosts hardware, providing storage, processing, and access to data, “with guaranteed accessibility, security, and management levels.”
The data centers will be obligated to report to the government directly.
These data centers of crypto mining farms will be obliged to report to the Roskomnadzor, the federal agency that supervises communications and mass media in Russia. Roskomnadzor is known for issuing bans and censoring internet content as it recently did with digital currency websites. According to the proposed bill, crypto miners will have to let the agency in on their operations, including their computing capacity, data storage, services provided, their physical locations, connection to the national electricity grid, cost of running the process, and more.
The ministry is inviting feedback from the public regarding the bill.
The Ministry of Digital Development, Communications, and Mass Media is inviting public feedback regarding the bill. However, the Russian crypto community is divided on the new bill. Those who support it believe that the law will bring compliance to the industry. Igor Runets, the CEO of Siberian mining firm BitRiver, believes that the proposed bill won’t pose any challenge for compliant crypto mining farms. The Russian government recently enforced new crypto regulations in the country. According to the new laws, cryptocurrencies can be traded, but no goods and services in Russia are allowed to be priced in it. If someone wants to buy something with Bitcoin, then he has to sell it for rubles first.
