Bitcoin After Liberty Reserve
By Lawrence
Liberty Reserve (LR) was in the news all over the place last week. As of today it does not even appear on the front page any more. It is a classic example of minimal attention span from the general public on subjects deem not important to them.
In case you do not know what happened, here is a short summary.
Liberty Reserve is a company that conduct private currency exchange through its Liberty Reserve money. It invented its own currency and function as a middleman to enable money transfer everywhere in the world where there is internet access. It has been very successful until the authorities around the world started to scrutinize its practice.
The founder of Liberty Reserve was arrested in end of May 2013 on suspicion of money laundering. The website can no longer be accessed at this point.
You can read all about its alleged criminal activities and how bad it is in enabling the criminals to conduct transactions from the major news media outlets so I am not going to repeat it here. I like to point out two things that I do not see the news outlets failed to mention.
First, many individuals around the world has no other means to transfer money have been using LR as the service for connection to outside world. LR functions like Paypal with the exception that Paypal refuses to operate in many countries due to certain rules and regulations that a bank has to follow. These individuals are now burnt. Their money is now frozen and their rights are violated with no one to stand up for them.
Second, LR is one of the major sources where people deposit and withdraw money to and from Bitcoin exchange markets. Thus Bitcoin is affected badly as a direct consequence. Yet, Bitcoin has not traded much lower after the incident.
At this point, it seems that the various events happened lately to disrupt the growth of Bitcoin has not stopped the virtual currency from expanding its acceptance. Instead, it gives the much needed publicity to Bitcoin making more people aware of its uniqueness in a world of fiat currencies.
