Money Transfer Regulations

Does anyone happen to know what kinds of regulations are in place for people who buy and sell unofficial digital currencies such as Bitcoin? I’m particularly interested in United States regulations, but please mention any regulations of which you are aware.

Registering a business or non-profit organization gives the advantage of being able to do transactions in the name of the business and forming a corporation limits liability. But it seems like it would be more trouble than it’s worth to incorporate or register a business until the profits are large enough to hire employees.

I noticed that in the United States, financial institutions are required to submit a currency transaction report for all transactions over $10,000 and a suspicious activity report for suspicious transactions. I don’t think a private citizen would be required to submit either type of report. In any case, so long as the official currency part of the transaction is passing through a registered financial institution, the institution would already be submitting those reports for such transactions.

I have read about money laundering and it seems that so long as a person is not knowingly laundering money, then the person is not committing the crime.

Profits would need to be tracked for tax purposes but that can be accomplished easily enough using accounting software such as GnuCash.

Am I missing anything? Are there any regulations prohibiting me from sending money to and receiving money from random strangers who may be criminals unbeknownst to me?

Don’t forget to look at state money transmitting licenses. That’s what killed Goldage. (They were one of the largest e-gold exchangers). They were unlicensed because that thought that digital gold was outside the jurisdiction (not legal tender) of the state/federal governments. The state laws were vague enough, and law enforcement was ignorant enough, that they were prosecuted by the state of New York.

(See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldage)

Lots of people speculate that they were prosecuted for political reasons and not for “legal” ones. The central banks (and therefore the governments under their economic debt rule) do not want competing currencies. This isn’t because it is competition (e-gold was soooo small compared to the FRN paper game). They didn’t want e-gold to open up people’s mind to the idea of alternate currencies. That is a far bigger threat.

Remember that a license is an act of privilege that can be revoked/regulated. I firmly believe that any action that you can purchase a license for is fundamentally lawful. (Ex: you can’t buy a license to commit a crime. No “license to kill”, Bond. 😛).

It is possible to claim lawful excuse to operate unlicensed. (By pronouncement or claim by right of notary.. again, you need to know what you are doing.)

Peace!

Remember NLS

There are two types of law…

The Law you can read, and the one the government chooses to apply to you…

Your Lawyer friends may be right, but so were joe stack’s and he got prosecuted…

Remember NLS

There are two types of law…

The Law you can read, and the one the government chooses to apply to you…

Your Lawyer friends may be right, but so were joe stack’s and he got prosecuted…

How encouraging…you’ve just told the poor fellow that even if he does everything right he could still go to jail—you’re making him feel like an ethnic minority!

In most cases though, if a lawyer tells you you won’t go to jail, you probably will not go to jail. Newlibertstandard uses paypal, which already practices know-your-customer and he is operating in amounts less than $10,000 which is what the money laundering and tax cheat police sniff out for. This means he is unlikely to be doing anything that is wrong OR anything that will attract the attention of Law Enforcement.

However---

Thinking ahead to bitcoin’s future—money changing services that operate on a large scale and don’t practice know-your customer would indeed be illegal and would thus have to operate within the onionverse, changing bitcoin to money services other than paypal (perhaps offshore based like pecunix).

Another idea would be for some future crypto-preneur to set up a Mom and Pop shop called “Grandpa Joe’s envelopes stuffed with cash” and only accept bitcoin as payment. lol.

When there’s enough scale, maybe there can be an exchange site that doesn’t do transfers, just matches up buyers and sellers to exchange with each other directly, similar to how e-bay works.

To make it safer, the exchange site could act as an escrow for the bitcoin side of the payment.  The seller puts the bitcoin payment in escrow, and the buyer sends the conventional payment directly to the seller.  The exchange service doesn’t handle any real world money.

This would be a step better than e-bay.  E-bay manages to work fine even though shipped goods can’t be recovered if payment falls through.

I love how the word “offshore” seems to mean “not in the USA” now. 😛

Trading with bitcoin without the need to exchange in/out to fiat is ideal.

The law you can read? Are you talking about legalese or English?

The Law you can read, and the one the government chooses to apply to you…

How encouraging…you’ve just told the poor fellow that even if he does everything right he could still go to jail—you’re making him feel like an ethnic minority!

He is a minority

The law you can read? Are you talking about legalese or English?

I am talking about the ones on the books compared to the way the government interprets ones on the books…