Law Decoded: How Long Is the Arm of the Law? August 7-14

Every Friday, Law Decoded delivers analysis on the week's critical stories in the realms of policy, regulation and law.

A fascinating technology very few understand attracts people who can earn a lot of money at the expense of other people wanting to earn a lot of money.

With the ICO boom, the SEC took a long time to put together the tools to grapple with billions of dollars changing hands, but grabble they have.

A Calvinist sense of inevitability tells me that the law will come, because the law wants to get paid.

US sets new standard for tracking down terrorist-bound crypto In groundbreaking news for the future of illicit financing in crypto, the Justice Department announced the seizure of millions of dollars in crypto bound for Al-Qaeda, ISIS and the militant arm of Hamas.

It's been obvious to anyone watching that federal agencies in the U.S. have been working hard to cope with crypto as a channel to fund terrorism for years.

A major moral distinction to interrupt such philosophizing is that Bitcoin doesn't kill people as with all money, plenty of people are prepared to kill to get Bitcoin.

While recent developments around the world, especially from Chainalysis, Ciphertrace, and the younger Elliptic have done much to pull the veil off of the "Anonymity" that governments so fear in networks like Bitcoin, Rosinfomonitoring's plans apparently include tracking for privacy coins like Monero and Dash.Despite widespread and growing interest in the area and questions as to how private some of these so-called privacy coins are, some have proved quicker at adapting their tech than the people looking to track it.

While government agencies continue to onboard crypto capabilities, there's a major barrier that resources don't always make up for.

If you take privacy tokens, a lot of the people who understand them best are people who would least like to work with the government.