Free Republic

On May 29, 2025, a bipartisan group of members in the House of Representatives from the Financial Services and Agriculture Committees introduced the Digital Asset Market Clarity (CLARITY) Act. The bill seeks to establish a comprehensive regulatory framework for digital assets in the United States, with regulatory jurisdiction primarily split between the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).

Many of you may remember my reporting around "Operation Choke Point 2.0" from the spring of 2023; TLDR, Biden's financial regulators, namely the Fed, FDIC, and OCC, launched a crackdown on banks covering the crypto space. The first casualty was Silvergate Bank, which voluntarily liquidated. The standard reporting around Silvergate was that the bank lent to crypto depositors and those depositors were flighty; when rates rose, Silvergate suffered M2M losses on bond portfolios and ended up insolvent. Except that's not true. Silvergate weathered the storm, even though short sellers and members of Congress like Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) encouraged a...

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) issued an alert to taxpayers on Tuesday, reminding them that they must report all digital asset-related income and answer a new digital asset question on their 2022 federal income tax return or face consequences such as delayed refunds or even penalties.The IRS said in a Jan. 24 release that a key change on 1040 forms this year is that the agency has replaced the term “virtual currency” with “digital assets,” in addition to some other modifications to the wording.The “Yes” or “No” question, which was expanded and revised this year to update terminology, reads as...

The CEO of cryptocurrency firm BCB Group says Bitcoin’s massive pump was triggered by a single Bitcoin whale, in a coordinated effort to buy nearly $100 million worth of BTC across three crypto exchanges. Oliver von Landsberg-Sadie told Reuters a 20,000 BTC buying spree executed simultaneously on Coinbase, Kraken and Bitstamp is largely responsible for the surge, which briefly boosted the price of BTC above $5,000.“There has been a single order that has been algorithmically-managed across these three venues, of around 20,000 BTC. If you look at the volumes on each of those three exchanges – there were in-concert, synchronized, units of...

In the digital age, settling your estate is not the only thing many need to think about. A new Google tool gives users the power to decide what happens to their digital assets, including email, photos and data, should they pass away. The Inactive Account Manager allows users to enable Google to delete their data or pass the info along to a trusted loved one after a certain period of inactivity - three, six, nine or 12 months. The company will email and text users before deleting the data in case the person is, in fact, still alive......

There's a good number of FReepers who, thankfully, do very creative things with photoshop and images. Having gotten up early this morning to do a pic for a presentation, I did my first bit of artwork for a work presentation using the new release of Photoshop and thought some of you might be interested in a thread about it and other related matters, especially Digital Assets Management (i.e., DAM). Being one of those people who was forever losing images and other stuff amid the clutter of disc and zip drives, I did two things to solve the problem: Upgrade...