Why the US government wants to bring cryptocurrency out of the shadows
by Nicky Woolf in San Francisco from on (#234DJ)
The IRS has issued a summons for data on millions of users of the bitcoin exchange Coinbase, but some are dismayed by sweeping nature of the request
A US government request to trawl through the personal data of millions of users of the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase signals the start of an effort to pull digital currencies like bitcoin into the mainstream, experts have said.
The "John Doe" summons, a broad order for data on all Coinbase users in 2013, 2014 and 2015, was filed by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) in a federal court in California on 17 November.