On June 12, the state of Michigan introduced a bill imposing criminal penalties for manipulating data on blockchains in order to commit fraud. This is the first attempt in the world to legally protect data stored on distributed ledger technology (DLT) — for entering false information into the blocks or changing the blocks themselves, up to 14 years of imprisonment can be faced.  

The deliberate introduction of false data does not raise questions — here the signs of unlawful actions become visible to all the members of the network and do not call for any comment. But with the change in the blocks, things are more complicated because specific examples of such manipulation are not stipulated by the law, and the action itself has, until recently, been considered impossible.  

As it turned out, this is feasible, as evidenced by regular and successful attacks on large blockchains, including those recently made on Bitcoin Gold and Verge. Therefore, the new law in Michigan seems to be aimed, rather, at protecting the network from so-called "51 percent attacks", which have become a serious problem for the entire crypto community in 2018.