Why Do ALL The Good Stories Come From Florida?
Nice Try, Punk.
This tuesday, a man named Anthony Murgio was sentenced to five and a half years behind bars for an illegal bitcoin exchange scandal spanning from 2013 to 2015.
Reuters finds that
Anthony Murgio, 33, of Tampa, pleaded guilty on Jan. 9 to three conspiracy counts, including bank fraud and operating an unlicensed money transmitting business. The sentence was roughly half as long as prosecutors had sought.Murgio and co-conspirators were accused of processing millions of dollars from 2013 to 2015 into the virtual currency bitcoin through the unlicensed exchange Coin.mx. Prosecutors said many transactions were conducted by victims of ransomware, a malicious software that locks up data unless people pay "ransom" to unlock it. Cyber criminals often demand ransom paid in bitcoin. The alleged schemes also involved the takeover of a since-liquidated New Jersey credit union to shield their activity. "Mr. Murgio led an effort based on ambition and greed," and constructed on a "pyramid of lies," U.S. District Judge Alison Nathan in Manhattan said during the sentencing hearing. Murgio unsuccessfully fought back tears and lost his composure several times in expressing "enormous regret" for his crimes, which the judge credited as genuine. "I am wiser today than when the case began, and I am sorry for all the damage I caused to so many people," Murgio said. "Believing what I was doing was OK did not make it OK."
What Does This Mean For Us?
Recently, we’ve seen tensions rise between the U.S. government and Bitcoin, along with other alt coins in the crypto-sphere, and with good reason. As more investors join the game, there is more risk of financial loss. Obviously, this would prompt both sides of keeping these transactions safe and secure, i.e. developers of any crypto currency and any government involved with regulating bitcoin/altcoin exchanges.
While I do think progress is inherently a good thing, forcing it at a faster pace could be catastrophic. We’ve already seen examples of this when top Bitcoin developers opted to solve some of bitcoin’s problems by August 1st, with a Hardfork. Although this is a solution, I feel like if there were less pressure on the devs to solve these problems, there might be a more viable solution. The problem with this solution is that the hardfork will create two different types of bitcoins, within its old and new infrastructure.
Essentially, only some amount of investor’s money will be transferred to the “new rules” of bitcoin, allowing it to be bought, sold, and traded on the market as fiat money. As for all the other bitcoins following the “old rules,” those coins will no longer be able to be traded in the marketplace. The only solution is to store any coins you don’t want to risk being lost (I would argue that you should save all of them) is to save them in something called a Trezor, which is an offline storage space for cryptocurrencies, among other things. You can either buy a Trezor on amazon, although right now, many of them are out of stock - the manufacturers didn’t predict this large of a demand, OR you could make your own. 
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