Existing law gives legal recognition to electronic records, signatures and contracts that comply with certain requirements and allows an electronic record or signature to satisfy a requirement for a written record or signature in certain circumstances. (NRS 719.240-719.350) Sections 2-10 of this bill provide similarly for the legal recognition of the use of blockchain technology for similar purposes. Section 11 of this bill prohibits a local government from: (1) imposing a tax or fee on the use of a blockchain; (2) requiring a certificate, license or permit to use a blockchain; and (3) imposing any other requirement relating to the use of a blockchain.
The US government has indictment BTC-e and one of its alleged operators, levying a $110 million fine for violations committed by the long-running bitcoin exchange.
Federal prosecutors allege that BTC-e functioned as a clearing house for illicit funds sourced from “computer intrusions and hacking incidents, ransomware scams, identity theft schemes, corrupt public officials, and narcotics distribution rings.”
In the 21-count indictment the Department of Justice alleged that BTC-e and Alexander Vinnik, the Russian national who was arrested in Greece and later linked to the long-running exchange, committed a laundry list of crimes throughout the exchange’s six-year history.
Category: cryptocurrency |
Comments Off on 55 years prison and $110 million fine for running an illegal Bitcoin exchange
I am in the process of fact-checking the ‘IMF Staff Discussion Note on Virtual Currencies‘. Only 14 pages into it there are already strange and pretty obvious factual shortcomings. So far, the most blatant one is that the International Monetary Fund characterizes the ‘Cost of Production’ for bitcoin (lowercase for the “currency”!) as high while assigning the value ‘low’ to the US Dollar’s production cost. Needless to say, this is an oversimplification but also hints at the fact that the researchers did not actually get into the math of the matter which would seem like an important fact when dealing with “money”.
Current bitcoin production cost can be calculated here. As everybody familiar with the matter knows: Bitcoins are being ‘mined’ by individuals for a profit – so there’s an actual marketplace for it. And, these miners also mine transactions – actually mostly, by now.
Below are the production costs for US Dollar bills and coins as provided by the “Federal Reserve Bank“. Of course these numbers do not account for driving these things around town in armored cars or the fact the JPMorgan alone employs 250,000 people (I assume they all use computers – not sure though). It should be easy to see that not a single miner would ever consider turning on his rig for such a poultry outcome.
