
Mr. Oreshkin, with all the serious gravitas of a man announcing the end of the world, claims that tens of thousands of Bitcoins “effectively flow abroad”-though how exactly they do that without crossing a border is a puzzle for the ages, or at least for the next cryptic memo from the Kremlin. Industry estimations have Russian miners producing somewhere in the vicinity of 55,000 Bitcoin in 2023, with a sad little rebound to about 35,000 in 2024, all while generating close to a billion rubles a day. A tidy sum, but still a far cry from “big country” status, unless you’re counting digital sheep.