SEC Want To Take The Bite out of Bitcoin - Keep your grubby claws off it

Businesses that transact in digital currencies or cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin and Litecoin, should be aware of the SEC’s increased focus on these transactions.
Since Bitcoin’s 2009 debut, regulators like the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (“FinCEN”) have scrutinized Bitcoin and other digital currencies to assess how they fit into the existing framework of laws applicable to money and securities. Regulators have also cracked down on a variety of perceived wrongs with some link to digital currencies, including money laundering, Ponzi schemes and securities fraud.

For example, in July of 2013, the SEC charged an individual with defrauding investors in a Ponzi scheme involving Bitcoin, and in June of 2014 the SEC charged a Bitcoin-related website owner with publicly offering shares in his ventures without registering them.
Now that digital currencies have proved more than a passing fad, enforcement agencies are establishing more permanent efforts focused on the novel legal issues they present. The U.S. Department of Justice had by 2011 established its Global Illicit Finance Team (GIFT), a task force consisting of investigators from the U.S. Attorney’s Office of the Southern District of New York, U.S. Secret Service, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement - Homeland Security Investigations (ICE-HSI), the Internal Revenue Service, and the Department of Justice’s Asset Forfeiture and Money Laundering Section.

GIFT was recently credited with the shutdown of Liberty Reserve, which allegedly operated a $6 billion digital currency system designed to provide cyber and other criminals with a way to launder their profits.

The SEC has followed suit. In a press release dated December 8, 2014, the SEC publicly featured its Digital Currency Working Group, which helped coordinate the investigation of Ethan Burnside, who was sanctioned for his alleged operation of two online venues that traded securities using digital currencies without registering the venues as broker-dealers or stock exchanges. The Digital Currency Working Group has approximately 50 members from among the SEC’s divisions and offices, and the stated aim of fostering information-sharing internally and externally. Though it was reportedly formed in 2013, it was not linked to a specific enforcement action until the SEC’s press release of December 8, 2014.

http://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/say-hello-to-the-secs-digital-currency-41762/

Reminds me of:

When Chemistry Was Outlawed

SEC Want To Take The Bite out of Bitcoin - Keep your grubby claws off it 1421113188757104

The Act Against Multipliers was signed into law on January 13, 1404, the work of the British parliament under Henry IV. “Chemistry” then didn’t involve a whole lot, but one facet was a looming danger in the eyes of the state: multiplication.

Multiplication was a term that in crude old-school chemistry—alchemy—just meant making more of a certain material. Synthesis, really. The powers that be were very concerned that such multiplication might involve gold or silver, leading to the sudden enrichment of sinister forces, or really any force that was not the one currently in power.

The Act declared, “that none from henceforth should use to multiply gold or silver, or use the craft of multiplication; and if any the same do, they incur the pain of felony.”

THE LAW PROBABLY OFFERED MORE PROTECTION TO WEALTHY SUCKERS THAN THE STATE ITSELF

The law probably offered more protection to wealthy suckers than the state itself. Prior to the act, a popular scam was for alchemists or “alchemists” to be entrusted with the wealth of some goofball, perhaps a rich merchant, looking to have their savings cloned. Lore had it that the Pope himself practiced alchemy, using the technique to enrich the church.

Chemistry wasn’t all scams and witchery in the Middle Ages. Just a century before the Act Against Multipliers, Francis Bacon was at work turning alchemy into a science. He had described for the first time the role of air in combustion, for one, and went on to experiment with saltpeter (potassium nitrate, a component of gunpowder among other things), devising a purification method using dilution and crystallization.

The Act survived until 1689, when Isaac Newton and Robert Boyle, considered to be the father of modern chemistry, both became preoccupied with alchemical experimentation. Boyle in particular petitioned to have this “secret science”legitimized once again. The “chymist” Boyle would in his lifetime clarify the idea of chemical elements, describe the differences between mixtures and solutions, study the phenomena of combustion and respiration, and hypothesize that the nature of reality was of indivisible particles.

Boyle died just two years after the Act was repealed, publishing in his lifetime over 40 books. Nearly all of his pioneering work in chemistry would have occurred while the Act was still in place.

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/when-chemistry-was-outlawed

Just a century before the Act Against Multipliers, Francis Bacon was at work turning alchemy into a science.

I suppose they meant after.

LOL!

Ya hair-splitter!

What's a century here or there, when discussing statist oppression?!

SEC Want To Take The Bite out of Bitcoin - Keep your grubby claws off it

SEC Want To Take The Bite out of Bitcoin - Keep your grubby claws off it

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