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Bitcoin Foundation President Brock Pierce discusses his trips to El Salvador to help guide and educate the country on how to make bitcoin legal tender.
A recent job posting on the Justice Department’s website is another indication that the federal government is on the cusp of stepping up its surveillance of criminal activity in the crypto world, FOX Business has learned.
Announcement says DOJ is looking to hire an attorney specializing in cryptocurrency and blockchain technologies, as well as money laundering and asset forfeiture laws to work within the division penal department. The post will be specifically assigned to a unit focused on crypto-related crimes. Responsibilities include prosecuting criminals who use digital currencies as vehicles for illegal activities and providing advice to federal agents on legislative and regulatory matters.
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The publication, while trivial at first glance, is further evidence that the federal government is concerned about the proliferation of crimes involving digital currencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, and foresees a broad criminal crackdown on illicit activity in the world of cryptography. In recent weeks, crypto-related criminal activity has grabbed national headlines, especially with the cyberattack on the Colonial Pipeline in May that resulted in the country’s largest fuel pipeline shutting down for days. Russian hackers were behind the move and demanded $ 5 billion in ransom, which was paid by Colonial’s CEO in bitcoin.
The FBI eventually recovered about half of the money by seizing a so-called digital wallet that contained the ransom. Last year, the DOJ seized $ 1 million in crypto assets from the now defunct Silk Road Marketplace, one of the most notorious criminal digital currency black markets in existence.
Criminal activity aside, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Treasury Department are monitoring the hype surrounding Bitcoin and other digital currencies and whether small investors are being misled into buying cryptocurrencies, which have no immediate intrinsic value. Digital currencies are used in business transactions through blockchain technologies, but the industry is nascent and has not yet been widely accepted as a tool to conduct business transactions.
“There is absolutely nothing you can do with Bitcoin – it doesn’t have the characteristics of a commodity, it does not have the characteristics of an asset, so it’s just a token, a speculative token. “Says crypto-skeptic Peter Schiff, chief economist and global strategist at Europac. “Right now people want to collect it because they don’t really understand it.”
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The price of Bitcoin, while well below its April highs, has seen a pretty impressive rise over the past year, surpassing $ 60,000 before falling back to $ 30,000 earlier this month. At the start of this week, it briefly fell below $ 30,000. Ethereum’s performance is even more impressive – the asset has grown almost 700% in the past year, although it has also fallen below $ 2,000 from just over $ 4,000 in May. .
Greg King, CEO of Osprey Funds, says he’s used to bitcoin volatility and argued that investing in cryptocurrencies is “actually a technology investment.”
Leading regulators such as Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and SEC Chairman Gary Gensler have publicly stated that they believe cryptocurrencies need to be regulated more tightly, although Gensler has notably excluded cryptocurrencies from the program. ‘drafting of the SEC’s spring rules, setting a precedent for more polarizing issues such as climate change and diversity disclosures.
People close to the SEC say Gensler and the commission are grappling with how best to regulate a business that operates outside the banking system.
“The government will inevitably try to regulate crypto, because this administration’s solution to every problem is simply to increase regulation,” said Charles Enson, professor of law at the University of Delaware. “The big question will be ‘How?’ It’s easy to say but hard to do. ”
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Still, many crypto experts believe tighter regulation is imminent. One reason, according to Michael Oliver of Momentum Structural Analysis, is that the growing investor appetite for cryptocurrencies could pose a threat to the government’s monetary policy since the Federal Reserve has no role in creating Bitcoin and other popular digital currencies.
Momentum Structural Analysis had predicted in reports starting in September 2020 that governments and central banks would crack down on private money and cryptos, as the growing acceptance of that money was implicitly a threat to the central bank’s monopoly control over it. their money, ”Oliver said. “Hence a threat to the implementation of their policy.”
Schiff echoed these sentiments as well.
“It’s marketed as a competitor to government-issued silver,” Schiff said. “So obviously the government doesn’t like competition, especially when you’re competing with it… so it makes sense that they regulate it.”
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Meanwhile, on the global stage, global regulators have been closely scrutinizing cryptocurrencies in recent weeks. More recently, China’s central bank ordered state-owned banks and payment provider Alipay to halt all Bitcoin-related transactions. South Korea has just confiscated $ 47 million in crypto assets in an attempt to fight tax evasion.
Here in the United States, the DOJ crypto task force known as the Digital Currency Initiative was formed in 2018. The unit was formed following indictments by the then special advocate. , Robert Mueller, against Russian intelligence agents using cryptocurrencies in their efforts to interfere in the 2016 US presidential election.
The Justice Department did not respond to our request for comment on this story.
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