Professor Chander Comments on Bitcoin Theft Case for Wall Street Journal

Professor Anupam Chander commented for the Wall Street Journal on the case of two former federal agents charged with stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars of virtual currency during an undercover investigation into the "Silk Road" online market, which allegedly served to facilitate sales of illegal goods.  The former agents are accused of secretly transferring large sums of bitcoins into private accounts during the course of the investigation.

Professor Chander said that the charges show that the government is learning to deal with crimes involving virtual currency.

"It might be hard for supervisors to recognize [virtual currencies'] value, because in some sense there will be a vast part of society that says these things are worthless," he said. "But in this case, what we've seen is that the government was actually acting carefully and making sure that all these coins are accounted for."

Professor Chander, a leading scholar of international economic law and cyberlaw, is the author of The Electronic Silk Road: How the Web Binds the World in Commerce, published in 2013 by Yale University Press.