Michigan State has introduced two bills on June 12, declaring that altering a blockchain is now considerd a crime. According to the House Bills 6257 and 6258; a person which alters blockchain records can now be punished through imprisonment for up to 14 years.
Also the bills updates the definitions for what is a distributed ledger technology and cryptocurrency.
They define Cryptocurrency as “a digital currency in which encryption techniques are used to regulate the generation of units of currency and verify the transfer of funds, and that operates independently of a central bank”
However, blockchain by definition is a digital record which tracks transactions across multiple computers, meaning its public ledger cannot be altered without achanging all previous blocks and collapsing the whole network.
The introduced bills are aimed at targetting all potential criminals which manage to gather an extreme amount of processing power, allowing them to alter every single instance of a blockchain at the same time.
By Nadya Astam