According to a new report titled “Busted, Not Broken” from the Digital Citizens Alliance, last year’s bust of the Silk Road online black market by federal authorities had the opposite of the intended effect. Time reports that instead of shutting down the “dark net” trade network after the arrest of Ross “Dread Pirate Roberts” Ulbricht, […]

In a letter released yesterday, the U.S. Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) further clarified rules for bitcoin escrow services and cloud-based mining operations. The letter (PDF) issues a new ruling that neither form of business fits the requirements of a money transmitter service as detailed in the Bank Secrecy Act, and as such would not […]

D.C.-based lobbying firm Peck Madigan Jones is no stranger to influencing how lawmakers view the world of finance. With a client list that includes the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the American Insurance Association, Wells Fargo Securities and MasterCard, the bipartisan firm makes no secret of its ability to sway the thinking, and the voting, of […]

Bitcoin’s steady march towards Wall Street passed another milestone today, as Bloomberg added a price ticker the virtual currency to its Bloomberg Professional service. The subscription-based service reaches more than 320,000 investors and financial professionals across the globe, adding an additional level of legitimacy for a currency widely considered to be “hacker money” only a […]

In August of last year, Netherlands-based drug trafficker Cornelis Jan Slomp was arrested at Miami International Airport in a sting operation targeting users of the now-defunct Silk Road online black market site. Slomp recently plead guilty to illegally importing and distributing a massive amount of drugs from March 2012 to August 2013, including 104KG of […]

When the fall semester classes start at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) later this year, the student body will be completely composed of bitcoin users. Two MIT students, Dan Elitzer and Jeremy Rubin, have raised around $500,000 in bitcoin for a project designed to create the first campus-wide bitcoin ecosystem at a major American […]

Latin America has a long history of economic instability, forcing many countries in the region to be almost entirely dependent on the U.S. dollar as a reserve currency. Latin America is also a huge piece of the U.S. remittance market, with the 17 North and South American nations in that group accounting for $41 billion […]

After a business decides to test the waters of bitcoin payments, it still faces a significant challenge: Letting people know about it. While it is true that many businesses experience a bump in publicity and interest shortly after accepting bitcoin, apart from window decals and stickers near a cash register, there are few ways to […]

There is little serious debate that the modern banking industry bears little resemblance to its historical origins. Although the popular conception of banks is that they hold customer funds and issue loans from those deposits, the reality is that modern banks are in a very different business. Today’s banks are mostly in the business of […]

Is the People’s Bank of China too big to create appropriate bitcoin regulation? According to a guest post on BitcoinBlog.de, that may be the case. Chinese IT entrepreneur Zhang Weiwu has a decade-long history of working with authorities in the country, and believes that bitcoin’s recent woes with the Chinese central bank is less a […]