The State Of Michigan Introduces a Bill For The Prosecution of People Who Tamper With Data on the Blockchain
June 14, 2018The legislature for the State of Michigan has passed two new bills that classify the act of modifying data available on a Blockchain as a crime. This is according to the House Bills numbered 6257 and 6258, which, as reported by CoinTelegraph, were submitted at the legislative tracking service of the US on June 12th.
A Felony That’s Now Punishable
The first bill states that any individual who alters, forges, counterfeits, and otherwise falsely makes a public record and has the intention of injuring or financially hurting another person will be held for prosecution. The felony is punishable by manner of imprisonment for a limit of 14 years.
Adapting The Laws To Follow Technological Change
The second bill modifies the penal code already existing in Michigan; it adds new definitions to adapt it to the new DLT (Distributed Ledger Technologies) in conjunction to Cryptocurrencies.
Cryptocurrencies are defined as digital currencies that employ encryption techniques so that the generation of new units of currency is regulated as well as the verification of funds’ transfers. Their independence from a central bank is also established as part of their definition.
Both bills have already been sent to the Committee on Law and Justice.
The Safest Registers On Earth
By definition, the Blockchain is a provider of digitized data records that can’t be altered in any way. The reason behind it is that all parties involved in the Blockchain hold a copy of it. What that means is that it is virtually impossible to change every copy of the chain to fake a transaction since its copies are distributed globally. The Blockchain blog IBM states that every signature will become invalid if any record is modified; in consequence, each participant in the network would receive a notification as soon as it happens.
The Blockchain networks don’t have a single vulnerable point that could be exploited for attacks; they also can’t be altered through the use of just one computer. In order to hack a Blockchain, a huge amount of computing power would be necessary to access each copy, which is something mandatory if any change is to be made to the data.
All of that must be done at the same time as well.
A bit earlier in the current 2018, the state of Tennessee recognized the legal authority for the utilization of Blockchain technology and what’s known as “smart contracts” to conduct electronic transactions. The passed legislation bill also showed a provision, which had the objective of protecting the ownership rights of particular information held safe by the Blockchain technology. The Blockchain is a distributed and digital ledger that was first used to record operations made with Cryptocurrency. Each crypto coin is built over a Blockchain. Since its creation, the technology has been a fascinating subject for many fields, from economics to politics, due to the plethora of uses it has for several different sectors.
