Stablecoin issuer Circle was widely criticized for allowing Drift Protocol hackers to steal $230 million in USDC tokens over the course of eight hours without acting to freeze the stolen funds. Now, it is being sued. Law firm Gibbs Mura on Tuesday filed a $230 million suit against Circle for “knowingly permitting the attackers, reportedly tied to North Korea’s government, to offload $230 million of their spoils over the course of several hours by using Circle’s own stablecoin USDC and its blockchain bridge CCTP, instead of freezing the funds.” It added, “Circle allegedly took no action to freeze the funds, despite having the technical and contractual authority to do so.”…
-
-
Buying Coffee With Bitcoin Is a Tax Burden: Cato
A daily cup of coffee could bring 100 pages of tax forms
With the proliferation of crypto spending debit cards, it’s easy enough to buy a cup of coffee with your bitcoins. The problem is that the purchase comes with a huge tax headache. Crypto sales of any kind, including using bitcoins for purchases, are treated as capital gains for tax purposes. So if you buy that cup of coffee every day, you’re looking at over 100 pages of tax forms, according to Nicholas Anthony, a research fellow at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. Saying “the process is almost tailor-made to discourage the use of alternative currencies,” Anthony noted that “capital gains taxes require you to tell the Internal Revenue…
-
Bitcoin Quantum Theft Freeze Proposal Draws Alternatives
BitMEX suggest canary in a coal mine approach
A controversial proposal to freeze older, dormant bitcoins to prevent them from being stolen by quantum computing attacks is generating a great deal of pushback, with several prominent sources suggesting alternatives. About 1.7 billion dormant bitcoins are locked using old encryption protocols that make them exceptionally vulnerable to theft by quantum computers, which will be powerful enough to break bitcoin’s encryption by brute force. Beyond that, 34% of the total bitcoin supply has an exposed public key that will be vulnerable to quantum threats unless transferred to new wallet addresses. A proposal yesterday by prominent bitcoin developers, including Jameson Lopp, suggested a three-stage freeze of older bitcoins over five years,…
-
Virginia Will No Longer Sell Off Abandoned Crypto
Escheated tokens will be held in-kind for owners
Did you know that many states will seize your crypto if you leave it untouched for too long? It’s called escheat, and the same thing can happen to bank account balances and unspent gift card balances left untouched long enough to be considered abandoned. It’s not exactly expropriation, as the states generally hold escheated funds for consumers to claim. But in the case of crypto, states usually sell off the crypto upon receiving it and keep the fiat funds for owners to claim. Which means two things. One, you lose any potential upside as the price of cryptocurrencies rises over time. And two, the sale may trigger a tax liability…
