Anthony Murgio and Yuri Lebedev operators of the Bitcoin/Fiat exchange Coin.mx were arrested by the FBI at their Florida homes last week and charges in the Southern District of New York by Preet Bharara's office were unsealed against them this week. The Feds accuse Coin.mx of trading roughly 1.8 million dollars worth of Bitcoin and Fiat using the pretext of a memorabilia collector's club to conceal their actual activities from their banks and later acquiring control of a small credit union for greater autonomy. Continue reading
Category Archives: Fiat/BTC interfaces
Transaction Fee Market Develops Amid Surge in Transaction Volume
This week a flood of transactions which has alternately been called a spam attack or a stress test has forced Bitcoin users to adapt to a competitive transaction fee market for the first time since early 2013 when blocksize was consistently near default soft limit of 250 kilobytes. Numerous Bitcoin users and businesses are adapting to the flood of transactions by increasing their own transaction fees. At the present there are more than seventy megabytes of unconfirmed transactions leading to more naive users on Reddit and other social media to revert to speculating about blocksize hardforks which would merely amplify the problems this sort of flooding attack poses. Continue reading
Greek Finance Minister Varoufakis Resigns in Failure
Greek banks continue to struggle beneath the onerous burden of financial debt imposed by their left-leaning welfarist government and as such are teetering on the brink of insolvency.1 Despite a slew of highly restrictive capital controls and out-of-the-blue "bank holidays" designed to maintain some modest levels of liquidity in the face of branch and ATM queues across the country, the condition of Greece's banks is less than ideal and quite possibly insufficient for long-term survival. Continue reading
The prospect of Greek debt default isn't just weighing down the local economy either. Inextricably intertwined as the global fiat economy is, the Euro has taken some damage, as have a number of stock markets around the world, as many are wondering aloud whether Greece is the canary in the coalmine of paper promises. ↩
BitPay Continues To Falter
An interview (archive) conducted by UK Business Insider's Oscar Williams-Grut with BitPay's co-founder and CTO Stephen Pair reveals the company continues to struggle in its attempt to entice new customers to spend their bitcoins at one of the 60,000 merchants the payment processor claims to have signed up over a four year period since it launched back in May, 2011. Perhaps ignorant to the fact bitcoin holders might be inclined to spend their coins if accepted at actual value and not the price set by the likes of BitPay, Bitstamp, Bitfinex and so forth, Pair told Business Insider: Continue reading
BTC Guild: Closing After Choosing Wrong Side of History
Bitcoin mining pool BTC Guild has just announced their intention to cease operations no later than June 30, 2015. This was announced by eleuthria on tardstalk, where all dead and soon-to-be-dead businesses go to announce "official" news. Continue reading
17-year-old Virginian Pleads Guilty to Tweeting About Bitcoin and ISIS
The Bitcoin badmouthing continues as reports are coming in that Ali Shukri Amin of Manassas, Virginia1 is pleading guilty to "conspiring to provide material support to terrorists" by helping fellow Virginian Reza Niknejad2 to fundraise for his jihadi mission in Syria3 using the one and only cryptocurrency. Leveraging some 4,000 Twitter followers and a personal blog, the honors student and "promising young man"4 from Osbourn Park High School is apparently a "public safety" concern and now faces upwards of 15 years in prison. Despite being only 17-years-old, Mr. Amin is being tried as an adult in the United States District Court Eastern District of Virginia.
Mr. Amin's lawyer, one Joseph Flood of Sheldon, Flood & Haywood P.L.C., now finds himself in the unenviable position of being just as much of a failure as Ross Ulbricht's lawyer, Joshua Dratel.
Not to be confused with the smaller Manassutten, Virgina, home of the ever-so-bear-wary garbage police. ↩
Who is still "at large." ↩
To fight with ISIS against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. ↩
According to none other than Andrew McCabe, assistant director of the FBI's Washington field office. ↩
Exodus From New York Begins
In the wake of New York's adoption of regulations which seek to regulate rather than submit to Bitcoin, Erik Voorhees has taken his altcoin exchange startup ShapeShift.io and taken it out of New York. Voorhees previously acquired the fledgling accountless Bitcoin gaming site Satoshi Dice leading it to a long reign as the most popular Bitcoin gambling site of the time. Stock in Satoshi Dice was traded on MPEx as S.DICE where it similarly enjoyed a long reign of popularity until Voorhees sold the site in full to close the security as part of a settlement with the United States Security and Exchange Commission over his first Bitcoin startup FeedzBirds. The exodus of businesses from New York, the United Kingdom, and other jurisdictions that wish to regulate themselves out of relevance in the Bitcoin space is likely to continue.
MasterCard Requests Regulation Break Bitcoin
In response to the UK Treasury’s call for information on digital currencies last November, MasterCard has submitted a letter in which asks for more regulation of cryptocurrencies. From the original text: Continue reading
Bharara Seeks To Prosecute Silk Road Trial Commenters
Popehat has obtained a subpoena pushed through by Preet Bharara's office seeking information on a number of persons who commented on a May 31st article by Nick Gillespie published on Reason Magazine's website. The article in question concerned Ulbricht's pre-sentencing letter to Judge Katherine Forrest. Preet Bharara's office intends to prosecute the emotionally distraught commenters under the Federal Statute prohibiting the interstate communication of threats. This is the same statute under which just days ago a conviction won by Federal prosecutors from another office was overturned and sent for retrial under more restrictive jury instructions as criminal threats must be demonstrated to have a culpable state of mind on the part of the speaker for them to be actually criminal. Let us consider each of the eight instances of speech that Preet Bharara wants to prosecute as criminal: Continue reading
Exodus from Wall Street: HSBC lays off 50,000 employees
Reports are coming in that HSBC, the third largest bank in the world and one of the most profitable, in a marked attempt to tighten its belt in the face of regulatory and economic pressures, is preparing to hand out pink slips to some 50,000 of its employees from its less profitable divisions.
With a particular focus on Britain, Brazil, the United States, Turkey, and Mexico, CEO Stuart Gulliver plans to cut $290 billion in assets on a risk adjusted basis by 2017. The cuts will be sharp and deep, with a full one-sixth of UK staff, around 7,000 – 8,000 jobs, headed for the chopping block. Redundant staff and other non-productive assets from Europe and the Americas will largely be redeployed as the firm continues to shift its focus towards Asia in general and China in particular.
It would appear that the current state of the world, what with the digitisation of finance as heralded by Bitcoin and the excessive regulatory burden and generally grim economic prospects of western socialist democracies, is even leading HSBC to consider moving its headquarters back to Honk Kong, where the Hong Kong Shanghai Banking Corporation was originally established in 1865 by Sir Thomas Sutherland.
Given that Hong Kong is taking a considerably lighter and hands-off approach to Bitcoin regulation, whereas Britain and others are doing everything in their power to stave off the inevitable, the former British colony would seem to be a safer and saner home for the bank. For now.