Miner offer to give the status of self-employed

Today it became known that representatives of the Russian blockchain market offered First Deputy Prime Minister Anton Siluanov to give individuals who earn cryptocurrency the status of self-employed. According to the authors of the initiative, this will allow the cryptocurrency market in Russia to be removed from the shadows, providing the opportunity for miners to pay a tax of 3-5% instead of 13% (for now this is only a theoretical figure).

A letter with a corresponding proposal was sent to the vice-premier of the company CryptoUniversal, as reported by Kommersant. The initiative itself is a joint one - in addition to the CryptoUnivers experts, RACIB representatives also took part in its creation. “We believe that the emergence of cryptoeconomics from the shadows is an essential stage in its development. It is necessary to classify this activity as a professional in order to attract investments into it, ”said the president of the RACIB association, Yuri Pripachkin.

According to him, the initiative has already been discussed with representatives of the State Duma and the Council of the Federation in the framework of a working group under the Duma Committee on Financial Markets. Among other things, the letter indicates a proposal to provide self-employed status to individuals who mine cryptocurrency with a tax rate of 3 to 5%. If the initiative is accepted, then “cryptocurrency providers” will not have to pay a personal income tax of 13%. In addition, it is proposed to create a “legal scheme for converting cryptocurrency into rubles”.
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The authors of the letter believe that the proposed initiative should simplify state control over digital assets, as well as provide an opportunity to legalize the incomes of miners, plus bring additional tax deductions to the budget. CryptoUnivers estimates the number of private miners of various cryptocurrencies in Russia to be about 350 thousand.

According to officials, due to the fact that now there is no possibility to officially mine, use and exchange cryptocurrency, many representatives of the crypto market are using “various shadow schemes for cashing mining income from mining”. The tax losses of the state are estimated at about 2 billion rubles annually.

It is worth noting that Anton Siluanov himself in October 2017 declared the following cryptocurrencies: “Bitcoins are not Russian currency notes, not rubles. There is no trust in them. This is a common surrogate. ”

Whatever it was, but now the miners are still in the gray zone, while the status of self-employed would allow them to work within the legal field and Russian legislation. If this were the case, they would not have to constantly explain the reasons for the increased energy consumption. For the sake of justice, it is worth noting that of the above 350,000 miners working in Russia, there are not so many who work with powerful farms, receiving, respectively, a large number of cryptocurrencies. To a large extent, this army of cryptocurrency businessmen is represented by those who have 1-2 mining systems on the balcony. Accordingly, charging 5% of the tax to the Russian budget does not really help.

The initiative has opponents. Thus, in the opinion of Nikita Kulikov, a member of the expert council on digital economics and blockchain technologies under the State Duma, the founder of the autonomous non-profit organization “The Right of Robots”, the proposal to grant miners the status of those who are being married is a populist measure. The initiators of the project "do not understand the legal nuances and the order of regulation of this kind of issues."

In order for this measure to be effective, you need to wait until the completion of the law “On digital financial assets” is completed. But we will have to wait a lot, because, according to Kulikov, "there is a feeling that in the second reading he (the law, - ed.) Will be greatly redrawn." For example, the Central Bank believes that cryptocurrencies are not a financial asset. Without coordination with representatives of the Central Bank, the implementation of the proposal to make miners self-employed is simply impossible.

Kulikov is dissatisfied with the fact that the selected tax rate of 3-5% is not justified by anything except the desire of the applicant. If you wish to pay taxes, the miners, like any other citizens of Russia, can simply pay 13% from the income received and “sleep well”.

In any case, while cryptocurrencies have not fallen into the legal field of Russia, it is too early to speak of any initiatives by representatives of the cryptocurrency sphere. In order to accept any proposals, there must be a solid legislative base, but it has not even begun to take shape yet.