California stops ban on BTC donations and other crypto donations for political campaigns and it seems that crypto is getting back into politics so let’s read more today in our latest cryptocurrency news.
The legislators in the state voted to end the ban on crypto donations and the municipal political candidates. The Fair Political Practices Commission ruled that California residents can make donations of various amounts in crypto like Bitcoin. However, here’s why we should not get so excited. While California stops ban on crypto donations, there’s a catch. The political campaigns have to convert any crypto donations into US dollars and the payment processors registered with the US Treasury can be used.
All of the state and local campaigns have adequate KYC procedures that can enable them to form a reasonable belief that it knows the real identity of the contributors, according to the approved regulation which was initiated back in May. Anyone who donates crypto has to provide the name, occupation, and address in order for the donations to be considered valid and legal. David Bainbridge as the general counsel for the FFPC added:
“In drafting this regulation, we had to address the inherent concern with cryptocurrency and the opportunity it presents for illegal contributions because it is inherently—intentionally, in some circumstances—anonymous, and in many circumstances it’s untraceable. So in drafting this regulation we were cognizant of these very legitimate concerns which was the reason the Commission four years ago prohibited contributions by cryptocurrency.”
With the new rules, no crypto donations can come from another source in an effort to prevent foreign interference. While it might seem like California is adopting crypto with the new policy but the fact remains that the crypto collected has to be converted to USD. In other words, the state of California will take your crypto but it doesn’t seem to have any potential benefits or utility in holding it long-term. The approved rules were favorable to crypto out of the proposed options that include keeping the ban or capping crypto donations at $100.
As recently reported, The California DOJ cracks down on an illegal Bitcoin ATM business that ended up sentencing Kais Mohammad for money laundering. Kais Mohammad was sentenced to two years in prison after he pleaded guilty as he operated an unlicensed virtual currency business and managed to launder between $15 million and $25 million in BTC and cash.
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