After eight months, an update on the Blockchain Alliance
The Blockchain Alliance was announced last October. Since then it has grown from about 20 to over 50 members, including digital currency companies, law enforcement groups, and regulatory bodies from all over the world. But what has it been up to?
Last October, Coin Center and the Chamber of Digital Commerce announced that they had teamed up with our firm, Steptoe & Johnson LLP, to create the Blockchain Alliance, a coalition...
A Florida court just dismissed a money laundering case and said that bitcoin isn’t “money.”
That result is unsurprising given the uncertainty that surrounds state regulation of businesses in this space; an area of law we've been working hard to rationalize.
There's a great passage in the Court's opinion: The Florida Legislature may choose to adopt statutes regulating virtual currency in the future. At this time. however, attempting to fit the...
Patents for an open source project sound scary, but it makes sense.
Blockstream announced a defensive patent strategy. Patents can make open-source partisans queasy, but a defensive stragegy is exactly what the ecosytem needs to protect itself from charlatans and trolls.
Bitcoin was born of the open source movement, the sort of passionate fervor that makes you want to scream STALLMAN! late in the night, while charging the Oracle campus gates....
We got a data dump of all the complaints about “virtual currency” filed with the CFPB.
Through a FOIA request, we learned that there are just a handful, even though the thousands of complaints the CFPB responded with left us scratching our heads at first.
This was thanks to a Freedom of Information Request filed by Muckrock News. A first glance at the data left us scratching our heads. According to the CFPB response, there...
A resolution calling for a pro-bitcoin national policy was just introduced in Congress.
A resolution isn't binding, but we love this bi-partisan pro-innovation, pro-fintech, and pro-cryptocurrency statement.
The bi-partisan H.R. 835 was introduced by Rep. Adam Kinzinger and co-sponsored by Rep. Tony Cardenas. Its preamble cites bitcoin and blockchain innovation: Whereas emerging payment options, including alternative non-fiat...
A law firm just filed a petition with the CFTC asking for a “comprehensive rulemaking” on Bitcoin.
Actual delivery of a commodity after an exchange exempts you from commodity futures regulations, so what the heck counts as "actual delivery" of bitcion?
Steptoe and Johnson, which has many Bitcoin industry clients, is asking that the commission clarify what constitues as “actual delivery” of bitcoins after a transaction. As Houman Shadab, Andrea Castillo,...
Is your crypto-crowdsale a security?
Peter Van Valkenburgh went on The Ether Review podcast to discuss the work we have done in educating securities regulators about the finer points of DAOs and other cryptotoken based crowdfunds.
The legal test for what is and is not considered a security is pretty flexible. Beyond the financial instruments that obviously fit the bill, things as weird as orange groves...
What does Coin Center actually do day-to-day, anyway?
That’s a question we’re frequently asked, and the reason we’re asked this so often is because we rarely talk about what we actually do day-to-day. We don’t talk about it...
Maybe the EU’s proposed new AML rules are not so clear after all.
While they distinguish between custodial and non-custodial wallets, what custodial means is not defined.
While I think it’s very heartening they seem to draw a distinction between custodial and non-custodial wallet services, Bitcoin Magazine reports that some in the Netherlands are unsure what would...
The UK’s new blockchain welfare benefits trial has privacy advocates freaking out.
But the larger concern here is that governments should avoid using proprietary software for "blockchain" initiatives; that's how you ensure privacy.
Representatives from the Open Data Initiative say: Experimenting with putting highly personal data in immutable data stores is fraught with danger. To avoid undermining trust in government’s use of data, DWP should...