Ice Rock Mining Responds to Kazakhstan’s Central Bank Cryptocurrenc...

Kazakhstan’s central bank chairman recently announced that it was considering banning all forms of cryptocurrency related activities (eg. crypyocurrency exchanges, blockchains, and all mining). The concern is over cryptocurency exchanges and the conversion of the nation’s fiat currency into any digital crypto-form.
https://www.coindesk.com/report-kazakhstans-national-bank-wants-to-ban-cryptocurrencies/

Kazakhstan’s central bank position is understandable as their might be concern over the movement and exchange of large amounts of Kazakhstan dollars (KZT) to cryptocurrency. This is a similar policy position as a number of other countries. Recently some larger national banks in other countries have implemented bans. One of the main banks in Canada, Bank of Montreal (BMO) will no longer allow customers to buy cryptocurrency using Interac debit cards. The Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) announced recently that it would no longer allow customers to purchase cryptocurrencies with credit cards and similar bans are in place in the US and other countries.

Both Korea and China have also recently added bans to only some types of cryptocurrency related activities such as exchanges and buying of cryptocurrency but still allow mining.

Ice Rock Mining’s Response

Ice Rock Mining has responded to this concern with a short video posted to YouTube titled “Ban of the Mining”
(see: )

Ice Rock Mining CEO Malik Murzashev responds to concerns
of a country-wide crypto and mining ban.

Individuals are not mining national currencies and in its response Ice Rock Mining maintains individuals should be allowed to invest their own money as they want. The Central bank official has warned of the risks of investing in cryptocurrencies and due to exchange rate, speculation and volatile nature of cryptocurrencies that there could be large losses to investors.

However, banning all cryptocurrency/blockchain/mining doesn’t make sense as there is a big difference between exchanges, speculative buying/selling, mining and start-up blockchain companies.

It is clear that central banks in many countries are struggling to develop new and appropriate policies surrounding decentralized cryptocurrecies and exploring the possibility of national, centralized cryotocurrencies similar to the actions of the Venezuelan government and central bank.

Kazakhstan is the second country in the world (after Japan) which acknowledged the need to develop a state level cryptocurrency system. For future growth and modernization, officials created a government program called “Digital Kazakhstan” to focus on block chain and cryptocurrency development (see: https://blockexplorer.com/news/tag/kazahkstan/). Moreover, the central bank has no official position regarding cryptocurrencies on their official website. There are currently no regulations, laws or Acts designed to impede the use of cryptocurrency in the country. The comments of the central bank chairman are at odds with the current government position that is aimed at technological modernization of the country’s economy.

Ice Rock Mining gives an example of why this approach of a mining ban is difficult to enforce as any person that owns a laptop and pays for electricity can start mining cryptocurrencies on their personal computers at home or join a cloud mining group on the internet.

The positive side of allowing cryptomining is that it encourages the growth of businesses inside the country (which is something the government supports). The President of Kazakhstan is very forward looking and supports the development of new digital-based businesses for economic growth.

Even though the central bank has expressed concerns over cryptocurrency many ICOs within Kazakhstan are continuing forward and Ice Rock Mining continues with its progress to build its server farm. At the end of Feb 2018 Ice Rock Mining had installed its first 100 machines and was testing its initial mining set up. By early April 2018 the company confirmed it had 130 miners and 140 video cards (for GPU mining ) at work in the cave. The company has ordered another batch of miners and await newer machines with increased hashing power that use lower amounts of electricity.

The company is being cautious and slowly building up its numbers to have the best mining rigs available. It is unknown how many rigs it will have set up by July 2018 when mining begins for the collective group of token holders.

Summary

Investors of Ice Rock Mining should consider the words of the central bank official as cryptocurrency is highly speculative and volatile. The price of BTC has dropped to half this value since the end of February. Investors must consider the context of their investment. The Ice Rock Mining dividend may be lower than expected as it is directly tied to the exchange market price of BTC. If the price of BTC recovers and goes higher in the future the dividend paid in ETH will similarly rise. Also the initial number of mining rigs is small but will increase over time resulting in increased mined BTC.

For these reasons investors of Ice Rock Mining should be aware that this investment dividend is and will be very volatile in nature, mirroring the fluctuations of BTC’s price movement. Regardless of the volatility of cryptocurrencies the dividend from holding ROCK2 tokens, which will be earned each month, is a positive token/cash flow situation.

Ice Rock Mining remains one of the best ICOs for long-term investing and one of the few ICOs offering a dividend for holding their tokens.