It’s tempting to think that Bitcoin services would be immune to patent litigation. After all, Bitcoin protocol is open source and seems to be in the public domain. Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous designer of Bitcoin, uploaded a whitepaper describing the currency on October 31, 2008, and he released operative source…
In January 2014, Overstock.com became the first major online retailer to accept payment in bitcoin. Less than eighteen months later, Overstock is now the first company to offer qualified buyers the option of purchasing private cryptosecurities, in the form of bonds. The corporate bonds will trade using Bitcoin’s blockchain protocol….
New York State Department of Financial Services (NYDFS) Superintendent Benjamin Lawsky in a speech yesterday at the BITS Emerging Payment Forum announced the final version of the long-awaited BitLicense. He stressed several points in his short speech, and during the speech, NYDFS published the final version of the rule on…
On May 29, 2015, after a lengthy criminal investigation and multi-week trial, Ross Ulbricht, the mastermind behind Silk Road—one of the most famous enterprises to utilize Bitcoin currency—was sentenced to life in prison in a Manhattan federal courtroom. In 2011, Ulbricht founded Silk Road, an anonymous, online marketplace where everything…
On April 22, 2015, the European Securities and Markets Authority (“ESMA”) – the European Union’s (“EU”) securities watchdog agency – issued a formal call for evidence regarding investments using virtual currency or distributed ledger technology. ESMA is an independent EU authority responsible for safeguarding the stability, integrity, transparency, and efficiency…
MtGox Co., Ltd., once the world’s largest Bitcoin exchange company, is insolvent, bankrupt, and now history. This bankruptcy (which I discussed yesterday) offers lessons to cryptocurrency startups. Mt. Gox’s fundamental lack of professionalism has become painfully clear since it filed for bankruptcy. According to a Wired expose last year, former…
Thousands of creditors may receive disbursements from the bankruptcy of MtGox, Co. Ltd., a Japanese corporation that once ran the world’s largest Bitcoin exchange. The bankruptcy filing last year was a rude awakening to Mt. Gox account holders who believe they collectively owned 750,000 Bitcoin, worth nearly a half billion…
Today’s computers encode data into bits – binary digits in one of two definite states, 0 or 1. Any calculation that needs to be performed with the bits is completed one at a time. Quantum physicists are racing to develop quantum computers, which use the various states of particles to…
Bitcoin continues to push deeper into the fabric of American society as it may now have an impact on who we elect as the President of the United States in 2016. Last week, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul became the first candidate to accept Bitcoin donations for his presidential campaign. In…
On March 25, 2015, the Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Controls (OFAC) announced a settlement with electronic funds transfer giant PayPal, Inc. At issue were almost 500 transactions totaling approximately $44,000 in violation of various U.S. sanctions programs, including for Iran, Cuba, Sudan, proliferation of weapons of…