Several big banks running the very system of money exchange that bitcoin was created to replace are now planning on co-opting bitcoin technology. This blog previously discussed that banks were interested in using blockchain technology to make money transfers faster and more secure. Now, UBS, Deutche Bank, Santander, and BNY…
Citizens in many countries the world over are plagued by an inability to record their land interests in a reliable and secure registry. Inefficiency, corruption and nepotism are rife, leaving countless people at risk of losing their land, and the livelihood they derive from it, at the whim of government…
California first proposed a licensing framework for digital currency companies in February 2015, though the bill was inactive by September 2015. Just last week, California legislators introduced a bill that was amended from the original bill in February 2015. Known as AB 1326, the amended bill proposed the enactment of…
On August 2, 2016, Hong Kong-based bitcoin exchange Bitfinex was the latest target of hackers who stole 119,756 bitcoins, for a total loss of approximately $72 million at that time. Some are estimating it to be as high as $80,000,000. The Bitfinex hack was notable both because Bitfinex is one of the…
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…
If you have an interest in bitcoin, you’ve undoubtedly heard people refer to “The Blockchain.” Because the term “blockchain” can refer to any distributed ledger where “blocks” are added to the ledge by solving complex mathematical problems, it should more properly be referred to as “the Bitcoin Blockchain.” Each block…
While many people in the U.S. are still skeptical that bitcoin will become a mainstream currency, both private and public sectors are gaining interest in the idea that the underlying blockchain technology can be used to solve a wide variety of security and transactional problems. In the private arena, industries are…
The European Commission recently published a proposal to amend the Fourth Anti-Money Laundering Directive, the legislation that specifies the anti-money laundering, or AML, and counter terrorist financing rules for EU Member States. The proposal seeks to introduce stricter rules on the reporting and identification around the users of virtual currencies,…
Decentralized cloud storage programs, smart contracts, and the shared economy– will they combine to be a mainstream method of storage method of the future? A number of companies are working to make it a reality. One, Sia (sia.tech), a decentralized cloud storage program, released a public version 1.0 of its graphical…
There will only ever be 21 million bitcoins, and the rate at which those 21 million bitcoins are generated will decrease periodically by half until all bitcoins are in circulation. More specifically, a user is rewarded with a given number of bitcoins when it discovers (i.e., “mines”) a new block…