The outgoing SEC Chairman Jay Clayton, who oversaw the rejection of nine Bitcoin (BTC) exchange-traded funds during his tenure, has told CNBC that “inefficiencies” in the current payments systems are continuing to drive the popularity of Bitcoin. Appearing on CNBC’s Squawk Box yesterday, Clayton, who is due to step down by the end of the year, confirmed his agency’s general assessment that Bitcoin was not a security but a payment mechanism and store of value. "We determined that bitcoin was not a security, it was much more a payment mechanism and stored value," says SEC Chairman Jay Clayton on #btc. …

A California-based visa and passport processing company announced it would be accepting Bitcoin as a form of payment as the U.S. State Department's operations are beginning to return to normal. According to a Nov. 6 announcement from passport and visa expeditor Peninsula Visa based in San Jose, the company stated it would be giving customers the option to pay for select passport services using Bitcoin (BTC). Backed by retailer payment facilitator Coinbase Commerce, Peninsula Visa will be offering passport renewals and name changes in addition to applications related to second passports. U.S. citizens over the age of 16 are allowed …

Brian Brooks, the former Coinbase executive turned leader of the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, or OCC, recently received a letter from multiple members of Congress expressing concerns over his crypto-heavy leadership. The letter, from Stephen Lynch and Rashida Tlaib, two congresspeople for Massachusetts and Michigan respectively, also holds signatures from Jesús García, Deb Haaland, Barbara Lee and Ayanna Pressley — representatives from Illinois, New Mexico, California and Massachusetts. The letter references the OCC's "recent unilateral actions in the digital financial activities space, including interpretive letters on cryptocurrency custody, stablecoins, and its announced plans to start offering …

As part of his statement to the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, acting Comptroller of the Currency, Brian Brooks, prepared a whole section on crypto assets, including specific mention of stablecoins. "Today, roughly 60 million Americans own some type of cryptocurrency, with a total market cap of nearly $430 billion," Brooks said, adding: "These figures clearly illustrate that this payment mechanism is now firmly entrenched in the financial mainstream. Cryptocurrency has become a popular mechanism for sending and receiving payments for goods and services because transactions post in real time and provide convenience and security." Brooks …

President of the Dallas Federal Reserve Robert Kaplan believes the US central bank should begin work on a digital currency immediately, a clear indicator that some policymakers view this as an urgent matter. Speaking Tuesday at a virtual conference hosted by Bloomberg, Kaplan reportedly said: “It is critical that the Fed focuses on developing a digital currency in the coming months and years.” The central banker’s remarks were part of a broader discussion on the economy and fiscal policy. Kaplan is a member of this year’s Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), the organization tasked with setting monetary policy. The 2020 …

On Wednesday, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced the departure of William Hinman by the end of this year. Hinman joined the commission in 2017 and is currently the director of the SEC's Division of Corporate Finance. He also spearheaded the SEC's early work with digital assets, in which role he has made critical contributions to the discussion of which cryptocurrencies qualify as securities. The announcement says: "Mr. Hinman led efforts regarding the rapid innovation in digital assets, including by providing a framework that market participants could use to evaluate whether digital assets are offered and sold as securities." …

U.S. presidential candidate Brock Pierce believes true decentralization, in its purest form, does not exist today, and is not practical in the near future. He told Celsius founder and CEO Alex Mashinsky in an hour-long #MOIP interview released earlier today that while DeFi, is headed towards decentralization, it shouldn’t attempt to be entirely decentralized right now. The crypto venture capitalist turned politician stated a hybrid approach including both decentralized and centralized control is more appropriate. “All of us in this space generally believe in decentralization,” he said. “The reality is that it [a hybrid approach] is just more practical in …

Recent comments from Jerome Powell, the chairman of the United States Federal Reserve, show the American government is not especially concerned with speed when it comes to developing a central bank digital currency, or CBDC. In contrast, Morgan Creek Digital co-founder Anthony Pompliano argues that time is of the essence. "They're talking about, like, maybe we'll build one in the next couple of years," Pompliano said of Powell's recent comments on CBDCs. "This is not a next-couple-of-years thing," Pomp said Monday on an episode of his YouTube show Lunch Money. "This is a right-now thing, and if they don't act, …

Editor’s note Blockchain technology has attracted regulatory attention since its inception. The security of the Bitcoin network despite the value of BTC in play has consistently proved the resilience of blockchain technology in maintaining records across a vast range of parties. However, many countries have determined that Bitcoin doesn’t behave as a currency at all, or at least not a replacement for their own. The nations behind the world’s most-used fiat currencies have in many cases pointed to Bitcoin’s volatility as a critical flaw. They have decided that the rise of stablecoins, especially over the past two years, poses a …

Corey Petty, a chief security lead at Status messenger, told Cointelegraph that he believes there is no way to marry end-to-end encryption with the type of backdoor access law enforcement agencies continue to lobby for. He also believes that any prohibitive or restrictive measures will be fruitless as encryption is an abundant and readily available resource, unlike nuclear power: “If you take nuclear control across the globe as an example here, and how successful that's been in terms of keeping us from destroying ourselves, we were able to do that because developing nuclear weapons is very difficult and is reliant …

Antivirus software pioneer John McAfee, the founder of McAfee Associates — the company that released the first commercial antivirus software, McAfee VirusScan, in the late 1980s, contributing to the birth of multibillion-dollar industry — was indicted on five counts of tax evasion and five counts of willful failure to file a tax return, which could result in a maximum sentence of 30 years if convicted. He could also expect to pay U.S. taxes and penalties, according to the United States Department of Justice. The DOJ’s charges were announced shortly after the U.S. Securities Exchange Commission revealed it had brought civil …

Among the leadership of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Brian Quintenz is known as one of the leading voices in favor of crypto. His announcement in April that he would only stay “until the earlier of the confirmation of my successor or October 31, 2020,” caused quite a stir among the crypto community. But now Quintenz says that he is staying on past that October 31 end date. Quintenz told Cointelegraph: Given the time in between that announcement and when someone was actually nominated, it seemed to me like there was a chance if I were to step down in …