Free Republic

Bank of New York Mellon Corp. , the nation’s oldest bank, is making the leap into the market for cryptocurrencies. The custody bank said Thursday it will hold, transfer and issue bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies on behalf of its asset-management clients. In time, BNY Mellon will allow those digital assets to pass through the same plumbing used by managers’ other, more traditional holdings—from Treasurys to technology stocks—using a platform that is now in prototype. The bank is already discussing plans with clients to bring their digital currencies into the fold. “Digital assets are becoming part of the mainstream,” said Roman...

Three men were arrested today in connection with a cryptocurrency mining scheme that defrauded investors of $722 million, U.S. Attorney Craig Carpenito announced. Matthew Brent Goettsche, 37, of Lafayette, Colorado, and Jobadiah Sinclair Weeks, 38, of Arvada, Colorado, are charged by indictment with conspiracy to commit wire fraud and Goettsche, Weeks, and Joseph Frank Abel, 49, of Camarillo, California, are charged by indictment with conspiracy to offer and sell unregistered securities. Goettsche was arrested in Colorado, Weeks in Florida, and Abel in California. All three are scheduled to have their initial appearances in the districts of their arrests. Two defendants...

A petition to amend Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Notice 2014-2, the new guidance released on 25th March that announced digital currencies would be treated as property for tax purposes, has been filed on WhiteHouse.gov. Managed by the presiding presidential administration, the official website of the White House allows for the filing of public petitions on all manner of subjects, from whether Election Day should be a designated holiday to whether Alaska should secede from the US and join Russia. Petitions that cross a certain threshold of signatures then generally garner a White House response. Filed on 28th March, the new...

When it comes to figuring out the main reason why every brick and mortar store in your local town is not accepting bitcoin as payment, you don’t need to look much further than price volatility. There are plenty of people who like the idea of a decentralized currency not controlled by any government, but the reality is that these same people only want to accept currencies that are relatively stable. After all, a store cannot plan for the future or pay for supplies, employees, and other costs when they don’t know what the value of each sale will be after...

A few years back, at the end of 2009, I was approached on two separate occasions by people claiming to be “representatives” of a digital alternative currency format. I was, of course, intrigued by the initial proposal, being that I had been writing for some time on the concept of non-participation as a way to insulate average Americans from the dangers of our unstable fiat driven mainstream economy. Before that, I had already dealt with just about every currency alternative one could imagine; from paper scripts backed by goods, to scripts backed by time or labor, to gold and silver...