Reports are coming out that Bernard Von NotHaus has been sentenced to six months of house arrest. He was convicted in 2011 for minting a precious metal backed private currency called the Liberty Dollar which he intended to have rival the Federal Reserve note. Von NotHaus had been described by prosecutors and law enforcement officials as a terrorist for encouraging private persons to barter with silver and gold coins as an alternative to using United States Dollars. The Liberty Dollar was introduced in 1998. Von Nothaus was warned in 2006, raided in 2007, indicted in 2009, convicted in 2011, and finally sentenced December 3rd 2014. Von Nothaus had faced potentially 40 years in prison and a loss of millions of dollars, but the United States Attorney only managed again, a sentence of six months of house arrest.
11 Bidders 27 Bids in Latest USMS Bitcoin Auction
Reuters reports that 11 parties have entered 27 bids for Bitcoins in the latest Auction by the United States Marshals Service. Reuters notes in their write up that Steve Englander of Citi anticipated most bids being entered below market price.
Congress Man Proposes Bill (H.R. 5777 Full Text Attached)
Outgoing United States Representative Steve Stockman of Texas has proposed a bill, H.R. 5777 that if it became law would impose a moratorium of five years on regulatory and statutory constraints upon cryptocurrency, as well as changing the treatment of cryptocurrencies under United States tax law to that enjoyed by traditional currencies. The moratorium proposed would apply to regulations and statutes at both the state and federal level. The chance this bill passes either house of the legislature is remote given a lack of support and Stockman's limited remaining time in Congress. If it makes it out of Congress its chance of becoming law would still be rather remote, because it would arrive on Obama's desk and require his signature. At present the bill has been introduced to the floor of the House and referred to both the House Finance Committee and the House Ways and Means Committee. Continue reading
MasterCard: Not Completely Comfortable With Bitcoin
Matthew Driver, who is the President of MasterCard in South East Asia, has appeared in a video in which he criticised Bitcoin for being unstable, lacking consumer recourse, lacking a clear purpose and electronifying cash despite MasterCard's attempts to move beyond such transactions. Continue reading
Bitcoin Domain Registrations Shown To Correlate With Bitcoin Price
Verisign have published data which shows a correlation between the increase in the price of bitcoin and an increase in the registration of domain names containing the keyword Bitcoin. The data also provides insight in the the total amount of domain names registered which contain the keyword Bitcoin since 2009, which is as follows: Continue reading
New York DFS Publishes all Bitlicense Comments
The New York Department of Financial Services has published the text of all comments it has received on its Bitlicense proposal to their website. "Signed" comments are attributed to names, and contact information and method of transmission was redacted.
Apple May Lose Big in Antitrust Case
AppleInsider is reporting that Apple Inc.1 is currently defending itself in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California against a class-action lawsuit accusing Apple of violating antitrust legislation. Continue reading
Apple is, of course, the company worth more than the entire Russian stock market. ↩
Justice Department's Subpoena to Theymos of Bitcointalk
In a continuation of the saga of the subpoena sent to Theymos of Bitcointalk, the subpoena has now been released. Full plain text below: Continue reading
Australian "Big Four" Attempt To Build Real Time Payment Network.. Again
The National Australia Bank, Commonwealth Bank, Westpac and ANZ, which make up Australia's "Big Four" banks and an additional eight financial institutions have announced their intention to build a new payments network that will enable real time payments. The network is to be built by Belgium based company SWIFT who today signed a 12 year contract to build and operate the infrastructure. Continue reading
Bitcoin History: Heroin Store Joe Job and the Bitcointalk Subpoena
Earlier today Theymos of Bitcointalk revealed that he satisfied a subpoena by prosecutors in the United States related to the yet to be tried Ross Ulbricht case. He offered that he turned over posts related to the account "altoid" alleged to be connected to Ross Ulbricht. He also admitted turning a number of posts, including posts deleted by users from a thread titled "A Heroin Store" which posed and interesting thought experiment: Continue reading