USA

Recently, the United States Senate Committee on Banking Affairs had a hearing on bitcoin, cryptocurrency and blockchain regulation and appreciated the thrilling difficulties in effecting a cryptoasset ban.

Several developed countries, like the United States, China, Russia and others, see Bitcoin and other digital currencies as speculative tools. They think investors will only become rich or benefit if they invest and wait for probably like five, ten, fifteen or even twenty years along the line. Nevertheless, some countries look at cryptocurrencies as a new, fast, secure and easy means of payment, especially when carrying out cross-border payments. In this technological era, smaller countries globally have continued to embrace the use of blockchain and cryptocurrency.

The US federal government revenue service, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), has started the exercise of emailing around 10,000 letters to different Bitcoin and cryptoasset holders that have maybe failed to pay or report taxes and income on digital asset transactions. They are trying to warn them to act in accordance with the federal tax laws, The WSJ reports.

US prosecutors recently filed an official complaint against presently-nonoperational cryptocurrency exchange BTC-e and alleged cybercriminal Alexander Vinnik, as per a document filed on Thursday last week in California. Alexander also purportedly holds accounts connected with other major illegal activities, such as the hack of another nonoperational exchange Mt. Gox.

The Russian arms producer, Soyuzmash, seeks to bypass US sanctions using cryptocurrency. The Union of Machine Builders recently requested permission from the Central Bank of Russia to allow it accept payments in Bitcoin for all its activities related to weapons. They believe this will enable them doge the US and other existing international sanctions. Russia is the world’s second main exporter of arms, commanding 21% of the global market, following the US with around 36%.

The entire blockchain and cryptocurrency community is waiting for clear regulatory hearings organized by the United States (US) Senate Banking Committee which are believed will transform the future of this embryonic digital asset sector when effective regulations are introduced and well implemented.

The latest research shows that Libra, the cryptocurrency owned by Facebook, is now ranked the third most searched keyword on Weibo, a Chinese search engine. Libra follows words like “Chinese Movie Star” and Mona Lisa correspondingly. This is an indicator that people living in the country have started to gain appetite for digital currency including Libra, Bitcoin and others.

Topnotch company Nestlé (a food and beverage firm), McDonald’s (a US fast food firm) and Virgin Media Ltd (a UK telecom company) have engaged in the JICWEBS distributed ledger tech (DLT) trial to enhance trust as well as transparency in digital advertising. JICWEBS was formed by the United Kingdom and Ireland media sector to guarantee independence, maverick and affinity of measurement on the web.

Blockchain enables us to use Bitcoin in transferring value in a secure, immutable and transparent way. It is now around ten years since when Bitcoin was created by Nakamoto Satoshi, but in this short period, various authorities have managed to come up with ways in which blockchain can be utilized to the fullest. Now, Siemens AG, a German global conglomerate firm and the biggest industrial manufacturing firm in the continent of Europe, has started its journey of evaluating blockchain for different business use cases, such as modernizing the carsharing market.