In a recent blog post the International Monetary Fund presented a key feature of Bitcoin as a "risk" to its agenda, namely the one where Bitcoin allows people to transact without regard for various controls states would like to impose (archived). They further advocated the populist misconception that Bitcoin exists for the poor who have been excluded from existing financial services due to their poverty.

Bitstamp declared in an email that they are banning access from all IP addresses originating from the Russian Federation to their website.. The email was posted on Bitcointalk citing a draft proposal, via Coindesk, for Russia to restrict surrogate money. Coindesk claims upon speaking with the deputy minister of finance, Alexey Moiseev, that there are plans to create laws to punish any individual attempting to convert cryptocurrency into Rubles. However, no official law has yet to be implemented banning the use of Bitcoin in Russia, and a draft proposal to amend the use of surrogate money was published on a Russian news outlet which states (translated):

cryptocurrency, production of which is not carried out on the territory of the Russian Federation, will no longer be money substitutes

If ratified the aforementioned amendments would not go into effect until sometime 2017, thus cryptocurrency produced outside of Russian jurisdiction would technically be legal. Bitstamp's preemptive banning of Russian customers, similar to that of Satoshi Dice blacklisting US-based IP addressed, seems completely unwarranted. It has yet to be confirmed whether or not the funds of Russian customers are accessible for withdrawal or have been "frozen" by the exchange.

Yesterday morning after a large price decline broomstick fired partially in response to Mike Hearn's temper tantrum, Coinbase's exchange experienced a complete outage. The outage was eventually resolved and trading resumed. Brian Armstrong took to Twitter and blamed the outage on a DDoS. He is claiming the attack consumed 1 TB of bandwidth. Coinbase solicited the services of Cloudflare in late December. This mitigation service served more as a marketing tactic than as a measure to establish actual security – a lesson Coinbase seems to have yet to learn.

Robocoin, former Bitcoin ATM maker, and their remittance service Romit are planning to cease Bitcoin operations. They are advertising a February 15th service end date in communications with users which suggests anything remaining on deposit with them should be withdrawn as soon as possible.