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July 2018 www.intellinews.com I Page 7
said the government was planning to include the mining of cryptocurrency into the official state register of economic activities.
“By adding the crypto mining sector to the classifier, we will bring it out of the shadow economy and collect more budget revenues” Minister of Economic Development Stepan Kubiv said in a press release. But some doubt this will be enough, while other attempts at legislating have remained unsuccessful so far.
Others remain optimistic. In a busy industrial area on the outskirts of Kiev, Oles Slobodeniuk showcases Hotmine, a start-up where a dozen people work on finding new ways to efficiently
mine cryptocurrency. Further down the building, ventilators and racks of processors are lined
up in a noisy room. “It’s just a showroom,” Oles says, though he admits the mining of bitcoin makes about half of his company’s revenue, with the other half coming from the sale of mining equipment.
Slobodeniuk started working in the cryptocur- rency business in 2013 and has since become
one of Ukraine’s biggest bitcoin advocate. Neither the difficult legislative context nor the fall of the bitcoin’s prince in 2018 has been able to faze him: “Bitcoin is profitable,” he says, and “will be. And of course it’s legal. Mining bitcoin is just mathemat- ics. You can’t ban mathematics.”
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