EU ministers meet in Brussels to talk about Bitcoin's future

Nov 21, 2015 08:31 GMT  ·  By

Several EU ministers met yesterday in Brussels, Belgium in an emergency meeting to discuss plans for regulating Bitcoin, following last week's terrorist attacks on Paris, France.

Law enforcement has known for many years that ISIS and many other criminal groups use Bitcoin to move funds from one cell to another. Days before the Paris attacks, the Ghost Security Group revealed that they had investigated multiple Bitcoin wallets containing more than $3 million / €2.8 million, all leading back to known ISIS members.

While police have many times tracked down and closed various accounts, the world of Bitcoin and the other virtual crypto-currencies have yet to be officially regulated.

Public opinion until the Paris attacks has always been against doing so, mostly because most people liked the anonymity and lack of taxation that this currency provides. Things dramatically changed during the past week's events.

When the Anonymous hacktivism group started going after and taking down ISIS social media accounts, many users asked the group to go after ISIS' true source of power, their Bitcoin wallets.

No details yet, just an initial meeting

In answer to this public outcry, several EU interior and justice ministers from EU member countries have now met and started initial talks on a way to regulate and control Bitcoin and other virtual currencies in Europe.

While Bitcoin & co. is legal in most countries, there are also those that outright banned it. One of them is Taiwan, which did so after seeing a spike in kidnappings that asked families to pay the ransom in Bitcoin.

Since its inception, Bitcoin has always walked a fine line between usefulness and criminal activity. Despite all the bad publicity that the crypto-currency got thanks to Dark Web criminals, kidnappers, and ISIS, a few days ago, a UCLA professor has nominated Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin, for a Nobel Prize in economics.

The Nobel Prize committee responded by declining the nomination and saying that "the prize, as in this instance, the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Science in Memory of Alfred Nobel, is never awarded anonymously nor posthumously." Satoshi Nakamoto is not a real person, but a pseudonym given to Bitcoin's creator(s?).