This is not a ban exactly in a sense that there is no law baning bitcoin, but by results of this meeting they (Prosecutors office mostly) decided that some existing law could be used against not clear who. The whole situation is not clear either.

IANAL, but this official news states clearly that bitcoin is illegal in Russia. Really, it doesn't get more clear than a Prosecutor citing a law and exemplifying bitcoin as being illegal.

You don't need a new law to ban something. All you need is one stupid official to apply an old law to a new concept.

Based on the old law, one cannot mine, trade, accept, and even use bitcoin to buy stuff in Russia.

It is 'illegal' in the same way all foreign currency (more accurately, anything that isn't the ruble) is illegal - that is, you need specific permission to trade, hold or settle in any other currency.

In Russia currency is extremely regulated - you won't find rubles outside of Russia and within Russia what you can do with other currencies is extremely limited (and requires permission/licensing). They did this to stop locals fleeing the ruble and causing a crash. At one point 90%+ of all cash transactions in Russia were in foreign currency - so these laws stem from that period.

The best way to interpret this guidance would be as a reminder from the Russian government that bitcoin is not a replacement nor alternate currency for the ruble, and the same laws apply to it as apply to the USD and other foreign currencies.

This is far from a 'ban' on bitcoin, you can still hold bitcoin in the same way you can hold USD or any other foreign currency. You just can't settle domestic transactions in bitcoin.

>You don't need a new law to ban something. All you need is one stupid official to apply an old law to a new concept.

Or a SMART official. I, for one, am all for banning bitcoin.

Yep, not yet. But I'd like to see how they will be banning PGP.

Well, IMNAL, but laws seem to imply that developing, supporting and distributing cryptographic solutions without appropriate FSB-provided license is banned, although I never heard anyone had issues with hosting, say, Debian mirror with GnuPG and OpenSSL, or adding TLS support to some product. But it may be well possible that laws are there but it's just that no one cares to enforce them.

On the other hand, use is legal, except if user is state-owned and municipal corporations. Those must use only FSB-licensed solutions.

> although I never heard anyone had issues with hosting, say, Debian mirror with GnuPG and OpenSSL, or adding TLS support to some product

From the Debian package description for openssh-client, at http://packages.debian.org/sid/openssh-client :

"In some countries it may be illegal to use any encryption at all without a special permit."

That warning was added to the description for a reason.

As for hosting, there was a huge issue originally with the export of cryptographic software, which led to the creation of Debian's "non-us" archive of software that had to be hosted outside the US. That got solved once it was possible to distribute such software with a notification requirement. See https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2002/03/msg00... for the long and storied history.

I hope they won't but why would they want to ban PGP in first place?

Why would the Russian government want to ban encryption they can't break? Can't imagine.

More seriously, I assume there's a longstanding suspicion that any Western encryption technology has been engineered to be vulnerable, which isn't totally paranoid.