Criminal activity continues to undermine bitcoin, but VCs invested more than ever.
Some of the characters attracted to the digital currency bitcoin continue to be the biggest rivals to its success.
Earlier this month, the SEC charged two bitcoin mining companies, GAW Miners and ZenMiner, both owned by Joshua Garza, with operating a Ponzi scheme. The SEC says that Garza made $20 million in ill-gotten gains by selling customers shares in “hashlets.” Forget what that actually means—for the sake of the public image of bitcoin (both the digital currency and the underlying technology that powers it), it doesn’t matter. What matters is that this fraud, only the latest bitcoin-related criminal activity, brought on another round of bad headlines for the still-nascent industry.
http://fortune.com/2015/12/31/bitcoin-2016/
