The Kremlin’s advisers have recommended outlawing home cryptocurrency mining in Russia or in some of its regions. The proposal’s stated goal is to keep residential buildings from catching fire. Blackouts and breakdowns in the grid have been attributed to amateur miners’ heavy load on the system.
Energy Experts Want to Prohibit Mining Cryptocurrency in Russian Homes
The minting of digital currencies in residential areas should be prohibited, according to the Energy Committee of the State Council, a body that advises the Russian president. According to local media, its participants think the policy will lessen the risk of fire.
The plan is to outright ban the production of cryptocurrencies in buildings like homes and apartment complexes throughout the nation, or at the very least in regions of Russia where there is an energy shortage. Moscow and the Moscow Oblast, the region surrounding the Russian capital, are two of them.
Many common Russians use crypto-related activities as a secondary source of income, particularly in regions with affordable electricity, and these activities are not yet regulated. The State Duma, the lower house of the Russian parliament, is currently debating a bill designed to accomplish that.
The daily Izvestia revealed the information in a report, citing the minutes from a meeting of the committee held in mid-December. The energy experts also recommended that the federal government give regional authorities the authority to impose additional taxes on cryptocurrency mining.
In light of the fact that industrial mining farms already consume significant amounts of energy, Anton Tkachev, a member of the State Duma Committee on Information Policy, Information Technologies, and Communications, thinks the effort to forbid mining in populated areas and areas with low levels of energy is a sensible step.
Additionally, he emphasized how urgent the issue of energy security is, particularly for small towns that lack the resources to properly maintain and repair their energy infrastructure. The lawmaker continued, “There is also a chance that the mining equipment will start fires in private residences.”
The Russian Ministry of Energy noted that distribution networks in residential areas are not built to handle the overloads due to coin minting in households, as pointed out by Russian energy companies, and that it is for this reason that it supports the legal regulation of crypto mining.
As residents take advantage of some of the lowest electricity prices in the nation, which are subsidized for the population, they set up crypto farms in basements and garages, making Irkutsk Oblast Russia’s hotspot for home mining. In the first half of 2022 alone, 23 fires in the area were reported to have left mining equipment behind.
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