Bitcoin mining is not illegal, but building illegal structures outside of the agreed-upon restrictions is. A BTC miner learned this the hard way as he received a lawsuit from a landlord. The Block Crypto reported that the CEO of cryptocurrency mining company Coinmint LLC, Ashton Soniat, was sued by the landlord of his rented space.
The company is being sued by Main Mill Street Investments, LLC (MMSI), the company acting as landlord for Coinmint, LLC's base of operations--a rented-out office space. The reason? Breach of contract, or specifically, an agreement signed by Soniat which stated that he personally guarantees prompt payments of all fees required of him on a monthly basis.
Everything went well, until after the lease was signed. Allegedly, Coinmint, LLC began to veer away from agreed upon terms. In the company's defense, Coinmint needed a lot of electricity for their coin-mining operations; this was why they built electrical transformer units in their rented space, something that they didn't inform the landlord at the time and something that was not stated in the contract.
It's alleged illegal actions such as this that give landlords problems. In another case, Coindesk reported that a Chinese cryptocurrency business has been releasing false information to promote its business. BHB, a China-based cryptocurrency project, had allegedly managed to raise $20 million through illegal schemes, including an alleged illegal pyramid scheme which was reported by a Chinese news outlet.
The report said that BHB allegedly claimed to have a process where an ethereum-based algorithm would be used to facilitate peer-to-peer lending. The founding team behind that has been revealed to be fake. Two of the images, in fact, the pictures are of professors from a university, who are unaffiliated with the company in any way.
Chinese users on the Weibo social media market have been criticizing the company, saying that they have always had doubts about the said company. They thought that it was 'cheap' how they used latecomers' money to pay off the early investors, similar to how pyramid scams normally operate.
Be it illegal transformers or pyramid scams, any breach of contract puts cryptocurrency in danger of being regarded as a hoax. Legitimate companies and founders should do well to distance themselves from unscrupulous individuals who appear to only be out to make a quick buck, or are intent on habitually disregarding contracts and the law behind it.
