In Russia and Eastern Europe bitcoin is the working transactional currency. So said Marco Santori, Global Policy Counsel of Blockchain during the Cryptocurrency Conference at Cato Institute, Washington.

During the questions and answers session after the first round table of the conference, the representative of the World Bank asked the participants to speculate about the uses and abuses of bitcoin around the world.

Contrary to expectations, Marco Santori spoke about the spatial distribution of utilization and abuse of bitcoin.

“Western Europe in Northern America use it as the long-term investment vehicle,” said Marco Santori

According to Blockchain representative, the bitcoin use in Asia and China is different. “People use it there for short-time investments, basically for speculative operations.”Where people do use bitcoin for payments is the “second world”, Eastern Europe, South America and Russia.

“In Eastern Europe and Russia, bitcoin became functionally transactional currency,” said Santori causing murmur in the audience.

Marco Santori is counsel at Blockchain, the bitcoin wallet service. Last August the bitcoin wallet service counted more than 4 million wallets.

The situation with bitcoin and blockchain in Russia is problematic at best. On the one hand, the Russian parliament is going to vote on the law that will effectively criminalize any operation on bitcoin.



On the contrary, according to the recent publications, Russian banks may be allowed to use distributed ledger to store information on their transactions after the Central Bank’s blockchain task force presents the results of its work.

If blockchain is not implemented by the end of 2016, banks might lose interest in it, and further research of the technology will be useless, claims a source close to the Russian Central Bank quoted by newspaper “Izvestia,” calling the technology “super-reliable” and thus reasonable to implement.