False Alarm: Why The Japanese Ruling May Not Spell Doom for Bitcoin Ownership Rights
This is a guest post by Drew Hinkes, an attorney at Berger Singerman. Drew is also frequently published and cited for his work on IT and technology-related issues, including virtual currencies, smart contracts, distributed ledger-based technologies, computer data security/breaches, and technology regulation. Tokyo District Court Judge Masumi Kurachi....
Related News
The development of quantum computers may spell the doom of Bitcoin. Bitcoin is dead! It has been predicted 112 times already. There is even a website that keeps track of all these obituaries. The latest prophecy predicts the death of Bitcoin once quantum computers make an entry. This plausible prediction comes at the time when Bitcoin is going strong, rebounding from a recent dip in its price following the BitFinex hacking incident. The threat of quantum computers on Bitcoin was predicted by Andersen Cheng, the co-founder of a UK-based cyber security firm, Post Quantum. He was quoted by a....
Brian Armstrong, the CEO and Founder of Coinbase, in his blog offers an insight into the way Bitcoin Core developers group work against the currently looming doom over the entire Bitcoin network. The bitcoin block size debate is the classic example for the term “running around in circles”. Those of us who have been following thins know very well that the debate about increasing the block size has been going on for almost a year now and yet we do not have any results to show for it. There have been proposals to solve the issue, most of which were never accepted. This prolonged disagreement....
Bitcoin users around the world can relax: reports indicating thousands of private keys were released into the public domain have been dismissed. A site called directory.io caused a brief panic yesterday when it supposedly listed every bitcoin private key alongside its corresponding public address. Headlines around the web proclaimed bitcoin doom, with some speculation that bitcoin's minor drop in value was a direct result. It was, however, quickly revealed to be a false alarm, and then, a joke. Reddit user fiveturns, claiming to be behind the site, said: "I'm the owner of directory.io.....
The Tokyo District Court recently rejected a lawsuit by a Kyoto resident seeking reimbursement for Bitcoin he lost during the last year's Mt. Gox hack. As reported by a Japanese daily, the court made the said judgements after considering virtual currencies as the assets that cannot be owned by anyone. In spite of sounding ridiculous, this new definition of Bitcoin robbed the aforementioned petitioner - and other Mt. Gox plaintiffs - of their rights to recover their lost funds from the bankrupt exchange. Presiding Judge Masumi Kurachi explained the reason behind putting Bitcoin in a....
Although Bitcoin has dominated the headlines of late, Ethereum has also rallied hard. Since the beginning of October, the second-biggest cryptocurrency by market cap is up 32% to $457 at the time of writing. What’s more, unlike Bitcoin, sustainable fundamental factors, i.e. improvements to the Ethereum blockchain, seem to be behind the buying spree. Alex […]