On July 25, a Florida Circuit Court judge dismissed state criminal charges against a defendant who attempted to sell bitcoins for $30,000 in cash on the ground that bitcoins are not money. Defendant Michell Abner Espinoza allegedly had agreed to sell bitcoins to an undercover Miami Beach police detective who…
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…
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…
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…
In late February 2015, a California Assembly member introduced a bill (AB 1326) proposing a licensing framework under which virtual currency companies would be required to operate. What Is It? If passed in its current form, the bill would require that certain virtual currency companies doing business in California obtain…
The most anticipated set of guidelines for early 2015 is certainly New York’s BitLicense. Any day now, New York is slated to release yet another version of its proposed regime for public comment. In the spirit of college style last-minute exam cramming, let us catch you up on the story…