In Russia, the ruble has fallen about 44 percent against the U.S. dollar since Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine two years ago.
Paying Ransom
While cryptocurrencies are stoking a multi-billion dollar underworld economy because they’re easy to transmit and largely untraceable, the technology underlying them is also being embraced by Wall Street and even the Bank of England as a potential game changer in securities trading and settlement, making cross-border payments, and regulating financial transactions with more transparency.
Russia also has a favorable view of blockchain, Moiseev said, calling the technology “promising,” with “a great future.”
Hackers are increasingly demanding ransom payments in bitcoin, according to Internet security firm Kaspersky Lab, which also has found that the three top origins of attacks by hackers are China, Russia and the U.S.
“There is a wave going of so-called ransomware when a virus enters a person’s computer and encrypts all files and there is no way to decrypt,” said Sergey Lozhkin, a senior researcher at Kaspersky Lab. “Cybercriminals at that moment start extorting money to decrypt files on the computer and they ask for ransom in bitcoins.”
Bitcoin accounts for more than 40 percent of criminal-to-criminal payments in the European Union, Jan Op Gen Oorth, a spokesman for EU law-enforcement agency Europol said in an e-mail.
According to Lozhkin and other experts, however, efforts to ban bitcoin by Russian or any other country won’t work.
“A ban would be impossible to enforce because it is a peer-to-peer technology, it is a file sharing technology, and all people need to do to get around the ban is to have computers with an Internet connection,”said Jon Matonis, a founding director of the Bitcoin Foundation, a Washington group that promotes the cryptocurrency. “This perspective is out of step with the rest of the world. It’s like worrying about gravity, what can you do?”