Bitcoin Token Maker Suspends Operation After Hearing From Federal Gov't 258
First time accepted submitter Austrian Anarchy writes with this story via Reason (and based on a
report at Wired) about a maker of physical Bitcoin tokens. Quoting from Reason's take: "Mike Caldwell ran a business called Casascius that printed physical tokens with a bitcoin digital key on it, key hidden behind a tamper proof strip. He'd charge $50 worth of bitcoin to print a bitcoin key you sent him via computer on this token. Cool stuff--a good friend of mine found one sitting unnoticed in her tip jar from an event at which she sold her artisan lamps from 2011 and was naturally delighted given the nearly 1000x increase in value of a bitcoin since then. So, you're making something fun, useful, interesting, harmless--naturally the federal government is very concerned and wants to hobble you. 'Just before Thanksgiving, [Caldwell] received a letter from the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FINCEN, the arm of the Treasury Department that dictates how the nation’s anti-money-laundering and financial crime regulations are interpreted. According to FINCEN,
Caldwell needs to rethink his business. "They considered my activity to be money transmitting," Caldwell says. And if you want to transmit money, you must first jump through a lot of state and federal regulatory hoops Caldwell hasn't jumped through.'"
Far from harmless fun... but (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Far from harmless fun... but (Score:5, Insightful)
What he is doing is, in fact, money transferring. He takes money and transfers it. That defines his activity. Which means he needs to keep records. Why do people involved in money transferring need to keep records? To prevent money laundering.
When a bitcoin moves from one wallet to another, a public record is made. Bitcoins are the least anonymous money system imaginable; the morons who claimed that bitcoins are anonymous because money laundering would be legal with bitcoins are morons.
But this guy has found a way of anonymously transferring bitcoins without explicit money laundering.
That means he needs to keep records.
If instead he was a 7-11 and handing out those things as change from transactions, he would not be engaged in money transferring, and would not need to keep records.
Is money laundering the problem? (Score:5, Insightful)
What he is doing is, in fact, money transferring. He takes money and transfers it. That defines his activity. Which means he needs to keep records. Why do people involved in money transferring need to keep records? To prevent money laundering.
HSBC laundered hundreds of billions of dollars and admitted as such, yet the justice department decided to forego criminal prosecution [rollingstone.com].
After much public outrage and senate hearings, the justice department settled on a $1.92 billion penalty [crainsnewyork.com] (against HSBC $18 billion annual profits).
How strongly do you agree with the federal government's stance on money laundering? From over here, it seems that the money laundering laws are only applied to the small players, used as "discretionary enforcement" as a tool of oppression. It's rule by thugs.
What's so bad about money laundering then?
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Basically, the government hates that money laundering gives drug dealers a way to take "drug money" and give it a legit source.
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Basically, the government hates that money laundering gives drug dealers a way to take "drug money" and give it a legit source.
Um... the HSBC money laundering, which the justice department declined to prosecute, was drug money laundering.
What's the difference you are attempting to point out?
Re:Is money laundering the problem? (Score:4, Insightful)
The only form of "money transfer" that isn't so heavily monitored is the flow of funds into campaign coffers. Funny how that works.
Re:Is money laundering the problem? (Score:5, Insightful)
After much public outrage and senate hearings, the justice department settled on a $1.92 billion penalty [crainsnewyork.com] (against HSBC $18 billion annual profits).
A $2 Billion fine is hardly trivial. And comparing it to the bank's annual profit is irrelevant, they do lots and lots of legitimate business. Their crime was not monitoring some money transfers, same as this guy. But he was just told to stop instead of being fined a couple of billion.
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Remember that that's 11.1% of their PROFIT. So the computer programmer, who probably spent quite a bit of that 50K on 'costs of operation', like food and shelter, would only be paying 11.1% of what he managed to save, and even that only IF he was caught selling financial system back-doors or whatever his crime was. And who knows how many years he'd been doing it before he was caught.
how did this become illegal? (Score:4, Insightful)
OMG! The horror of it! People transferring money! What is the world coming to!
Perhaps we should be rethinking this; it seems to have gone too far.
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Dictators slaughtering their countries citizens and bleeding their countries treasury dry and retire to a tax haven after having laundered their citizens money. Political corruption, straight up bribes laundering and cleaned. Assassination payments laundered while you wait. Tax evasion at, well, economic collapse levels. Illegal arms sales to enable the killing of millions, all facilitated and laundered spotlessly clean.
OMG! The horror of it! People 'ANONYMOUSLY' transferring money! What is the world com
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No. He is not "transmitting money". He is selling physical bitcoin tokens.
Collectible commemorative coins that have things printed on them such as "1 Bitcoin".
These tokens have artistic features such as gold plaining, or construction with fine silver.
The coins have a public key / QR code printed on them of a bitcoin wallet that has the specified number of coins, and a tamper-evident seal. Inside the seal is a piece of paper with the corresponding private key.
However, the bitcoin amount that had b
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That's the thing. the article never says if the tokens where empty or not. If he charged $50 and put $40 on the token (or whatever he wanted to charge as a handling fee) then he most certainly would be transferring money. But if they where empty I see your argument.
Re: Far from harmless fun... but (Score:4, Interesting)
Selling "things" for money is not transferring money.
Selling stored value cards, like gift cards (which I think is the closest physical analogy), is transferring money and monitored by FinCEN.
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I was going to say, "I can transfer bitcoins, bypassing the transaction chain, just by giving people a wallet face-to-face."
If he's handing out wallets, what's the password to them? Are they all the same?
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He's handing out the public and private keys to bitcoin adresses with bitcoins stored in them. They are fancy paper wallets [blockchain.info].
Re: Far from harmless fun... but (Score:5, Informative)
If he sold wallets, he wouldn't have issues. He's selling wallets with other peoples money in it, or could be (the no one knows, there is no oversight... and that's the problem). And he's not keeping track of who gave him the money, or where it's going, and he's not providing the information to authorities. It's possible he's pre-loading these coins with values (e.g. $25, 50), and mailing them to people after he takes his fee.
It's basically the formula for money laundering, as the bitcoin trail ends with him, and 'clean' money can come out.
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(the no one knows, there is no oversight... and that's the problem).
That's called freedom. No wonder the government has an issue with it.
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Bitcoins are stored in adresses which have a private key associated with them. These address keypairs can be made on the fly by bitcoin wallets or wallet generators. Once you transfer coins into an address and the transaction is confirmed as legitimate it is recorded in the blockchain and from that moment on it is a matter of public record that address X contains Y bitcoins. If you want to transfer the coins out of the address you import the private key into wallet software and then you can spend it.
That a
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Exactly. Why would we want this currency that only moves in value only .5% a month. We want a currency that moves 20-50% in hours.
Imagine the fun of grocery shopping with it by the time you get done shopping you have to either take out 1/2 of it or you get 50% off!
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Since money is fungible, if you've got more in bitcoins than your average grocery bill, then you're already doing this every time you shop.
Re:Far from harmless fun... but (Score:4, Funny)
Yes, my cashier usually spot checks forex to see how many bags of cheetos I can afford because the dollar value fluctuates wildly due to its nature as a purely speculative vehicle.
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No, he just overprices the cheetos to accommodate currency fluctuations (or someone upstream does that).
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Good point. But wait...why don't my cheetos cost 1400$ a bag then?
Ohh yea, there is a regulatory body in place to make sure that wild valuation swings don't happen minute to minute.
It amuses me that people think they have a new idea about currency when in such a short time it has exampled the pitfalls of every single unregulated on before it.
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the government is still just trying to maintain control.
But that's impossible! How will the government maintain control without the bureaucracy?
The regional governors now have direct control over their territories. Fear will keep the local currencies in line. Fear of this treasury.
bitcoins going physical would be huge.
Don't underestimate traditional currency. The ability to deliver money electronically around a planet is insignificant next to the power of the federal mint.
Artisan Lamps? (Score:4, Funny)
Worse: Artisanal. (Art is what?) (Score:2)
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Any article indistinguishable from an Onion article is sufficiently fucked up.
Re:Artisan Lamps? (Score:5, Funny)
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SHOCKED! (Score:3)
....That it took this long for the feds to come in to play. No matter how neato your new currency is; if it's heavily used to electronically launder money and/or buy illegal items the days are numbered. Bitcoin -> Currency has and always will be the choke point the government(s) control. Unless they somehow setup a 100% bitcoin society but I don't know how that would work.
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This guy is being paid anonymously in what he considers a currency to send a physical representation of that to another location to which he does not verify is the originator. From my very limited understanding of the law that is what the feds are taking issue with.
Also, he is essence creating a physical currency. But I'll let the feds figure out what is and isn't legal with those coins and what is and isn't transferring funds.
Anyway, the point is that they are going to attack anywhere bitcoin tries to le
Re:SHOCKED! (Score:4, Interesting)
That's a good point. I'm sure the feds would still have a problem if banks trade IOU's and dont actually move the money, but do it entirely in not-dollar-values...
Bank A: I'll pay you 500 Monopoly bitmoney for that loan package. But lets leave it to monopoly money so there's less taxes
Bank B: Okay. Sounds Good. Here.. have a 'free' gift.
Bank B: I want to cash in my 500 Monopoly bitmoney for your Widgets and such.
Bank A: Sure, here, have them for 'free'.
Seems fair that he has to play by the same rules. I dont care about bitcoins, but people claiming bitcoins are above any and all laws (including laws of the country they are being used in, and converted to physical objects in) is plain silly.
Written in a biased way (Score:5, Insightful)
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Of course, the idea that government can't spend more than it takes in strengthens those ties. The way out is for us, the voters, to realize that government can and should empower its people with direct payments, instead of giving money to corporations. Create a basic income, and fund it with govt bonds bought by the Fed which can expand its balance sheet to pay for them, and return the interest to the Treasury so that the govt's borrowing costs are zero. The best way to fight corporate power is to provide i
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So to each according to his needs?
I know it's fun to bitch about corporate power, but corporations won't be shooting a pregnant wife in her own house (ruby ridge), putting you in a cage for taking pictures, or forcibly taking everything you own because they decided they have the power.
What YOU are talking about is the antithesis of free agency and liberty.
Re:Written in a biased way (Score:5, Insightful)
If there were not a government making sure that such an action would be punished, I'd not be sure about that. After all, illegal corporations (also known as organized crime) are known to have no qualms to do such things.
They don't need to because they know they can just call a government agency to do it for them. Otherwise, see my previous point.
Oh, they do so as much as they can (see statuatory copyright infringement). Also, see my first point.
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You need to read some history, perhaps start with the Pinkerton Detective Agency. 150 odd years ago it was larger then the US army and mostly sold its services to private industry for various services including strike breaking which included shooting pregnant woman, putting people in cages for holding signs and such. Then industry discovered it was more cost effective to pay to get their guy elected so their guy could sick the police on whoever was disturbing their businesses.
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Of course, the idea that government can't spend more than it takes in strengthens those ties.
And the proof of that statement is what exactly? Because that has not been true of the U.S. for a LONG time.
Indeed the simple truth is the less control federal government exerts, the less interest corporations have in using money to gain some of that control. What you propose would draw corporations to the government like flies, to a vastly greater extent than you see now.
This isn't money transmitting how? (Score:5, Insightful)
If I make giftcards to Amazon, say (I mean stupidly duplicating what Amazon already has in gift cards but you pay me and I sell you an Amazon gift code,) I'd expect to be regulated.
If I take your $50 bill and give you $100 british pounds, that's actually changing of money, but you can bet I'd expect to be regulated.
If you give me $25 and I give you a physical wood plaque with a bearer bond attached to it...I'd expect to be regulated.
If I manufacture casino chips suitable for trade in a casino and sell them, I'd expect to be regulated.
So, tell me again why this guy doesn't think what he's doing falls under any kind of regulatory enforcement?
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bcuz government is evil and takn' away ma freedums!!!!!
END THE FED RAWWWW
BITCOINS R DA FUTURE
Re:This isn't money transmitting how? (Score:5, Insightful)
Because he doesn't believe any of the stuff you just said. Neither do I. Why do I need to be regulated? Why, when I got to the bank and deposit over $10,000 to I have to explain to the government how and where I got it? Why is that any of their business? This idea of money laundering is ludicrous. The idea that year after year, we need to give up more and more of our rights and privacy just to make the feds job of catching criminals easier baffles me. If we want to trade dollars for pounds or goldfish, fuck the government. They do not have a need to know about our transaction. And before you start talking about tax collection, there are a lot easier ways to collect taxes that are completely unavoidable. But if they implemented them, people would quickly become aware of just how much they were paying in taxes and likely revolt. This diffuse mess we have now serves to obfuscate just how much of your paycheck the feds end up with, and they like it that way.
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Because you drove there on a road that requires taxes, and have a reasonable amount of saftey, that requires taxes, and the bankers are regulated to not steal from you, which takes taxes.
So your large money movements need to be tracked to make sure you aren't in a cash business and trying to avoid taxes.
If you don't buy into that idea, stop posting on the internet that was created with... taxes.
Re:This isn't money transmitting how? (Score:5, Interesting)
Because you drove there on a road that requires taxes, and have a reasonable amount of saftey, that requires taxes, and the bankers are regulated to not steal from you, which takes taxes.
Always with this straw man. Enough with it - the strawman is dead, bereft of life it rests in peace. It has shuffled off this mortal coil and joined the straw choir invisible!
The amount of taxes needed to fund roads and regulate banks an such is a trivially small and unobjectionable fraction of current taxation. The majority of taxation is money collected from less-politically-favored groups and mailed directly to members of more-politically-favored groups, plus the military.
No one is trying to take your roads. No amount of cuts to road build and regulation could possibly balance the budget in the first place. That's not what the debate is even about.
Re:This isn't money transmitting how? (Score:4, Interesting)
If I make giftcards to Amazon, say (I mean stupidly duplicating what Amazon already has in gift cards but you pay me and I sell you an Amazon gift code,) I'd expect to be regulated.
Apropos of nothing, should Amazon expect to be regulated for making Amazon gift cards?
This "I'd expect to be regulated" is, quite frankly, astonishing. It brings to mind a sea of humanity, all going about their daily lives while intoning the phrase "I expect to be regulated".
If I'm doing something that lots of other businesses do unregulated(*), and assuming that the practice doesn't infringe on someone else's rights, my first impression is that I expect *not* to be regulated.
I wonder how you came to believe that particular mantra.
Re:This isn't money transmitting how? (Score:5, Interesting)
Because if you take my $50 bill and give me two $20s and a $10, we call that "making change", not "money laundering".
Casascius exchanged Bitcoins for other Bitcoins, plus a small fee for the cool novelty token. He didn't exchange BTC for USD, or vice-versa, or anything even remotely similar to that. He made frickin' change (albeit more literally than normal).
That said - I still have one first- and one second-gen Casascius 1BTC coins somewhere around here. They already traded at a good premium over their exchange rate, this news should send their collectable value through the goddamn roof! Thanks, FinCEN - I still hope you all choke to death on a bowl of hyena semen, but this time, you've really done me a solid!
Re:This isn't money transmitting how? (Score:5, Funny)
[ SUPER: "When you do only one thing, you do it better" ]
Customer #1: I needed to take the bus, but all I had was a five-dollar bill. I stopped by First Citiwide, and they were able to give me four singles and four quarters.
[ SUPER: "At First Citiwide Change Bank, We just make change" ]
Paul McElroy: We will work with the customer to give that customer the change that he or she needs. If you come to us with a twenty-dollar bill, we can give you two tens, we can give you four fives - we can give you a ten and two fives. We will work with you.
Customer #2: I went to my First Citiwide branch to change a fifty. I guess I was in kind of a hurry, and I asked for a twenty, a ten, and two fives. Their computers picked up my mistake right away, and I got the correct change.
[ SUPER: "Correct Change" ]
Paul McElroy: We have been in this business a long time. With our experience, we're gonna have ideas for change combinations that probably haven't occurred to you. If you have a fifty-dollar bill, we can give you fifty singles. [ SUPER: "We can give you fifty singles" ] We can give you forty-nine singles and ten dimes. We can give you twenty-five twos. Come talk to us. [ SUPER: "We can give you twenty-five twos" ] We are not going to give you change that you don't want. If you come to us with a hundred-dollar bill, we're not going to give you two-thousand nickels.. [ SUPER: "We're not going to give you two thousand nickels" ] - unless that meets your particular change needs. We will give you.. the change.. equal to.. the amount of money.. that you want change for!
[ SUPER: "At First Citiwide Change Bank, Our business is making change" ]
Bank Representative: That's what we do.
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Casascius exchanged Bitcoins for other Bitcoins, plus a small fee for the cool novelty token. He didn't exchange BTC for USD, or vice-versa, or anything even remotely similar to that. He made frickin' change (albeit more literally than normal).
No, he laundered money. He is acting as a break in the chain where potentially laundered money stops at his door and new, clean money is issued to the customer for a fee. It would be akin to me buying your dye pack stained dollars and giving you clean dollars for a commission and not bothering to keep records or conform to any regulation.
Re:This isn't money transmitting how? (Score:4, Insightful)
In each of these scenarios, what regulations do you expect, specifically, and for what purpose? Please explain as you offer nothing but your expectation as opinion. Regulation is not the default expectation any of us should have. It must be justified in all cases.
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Financial Crimes Enforcement Network? (Score:5, Funny)
So if it is named "Financial Crimes Enforcement Network", then obviously its aim is to enforce financial crimes. So, not only does it not fight crime, nor does it simply ignore crime, it isn't even just promoting crime, no, it enforces crime! :-)
So... (Score:2)
Feds, pick one or the other! (Score:4, Insightful)
Choice one: BitCoins are a legitimate currency and are recognized as such by the U.S. government. What he's doing isn't illegal unless they are.
Choice two: Physical BitCoins are novelties sort of like the commemorative coins minted by Franklin Mint. What he's doing isn't illegal unless what Franklin Mint does is illegal.
You can't have it both ways.
Cheers,
Dave
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Choice one: BitCoins are a legitimate currency and are recognized as such by the U.S. government. What he's doing isn't illegal unless they are.
If they are charging him, then they are admitting that BitCons are a legitimate currency. Bad for him, good for the rest of us?
Choice two: Physical BitCoins are novelties sort of like the commemorative coins minted by Franklin Mint. What he's doing isn't illegal unless what Franklin Mint does is illegal.
The Franklin mint may have already gone through all the necessary legal loopholes, since it was a functional mint at one point.
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Might want to find out what these folks are doing- they will take your scrap and send you coins. I bet you they keep records....
http://www.midwestrefineries.com/ [midwestrefineries.com]
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This is incorrect, as his bitcoins have value beyond the coin itself. He is buying and selling financial instruments (bitcoins) and packaging them. When they were a few bucks each, nobody cared. Now that they're around a grand each, it makes a difference.
He doesn't just package your bitcoins, he takes yours and gives you one in a nice brass or silver package, minus fee.
Franklin mint coins have trivial precious metal value, and no other value (their "collectible" value is borderline fraudulent.)
He should change his model (Score:2)
Accept credit cards, use the money to buy bitcoin and send people their coin... doesn't have the free market appeal like what he was doing but would get people the product they want.
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Trying to sidestep the feds when it comes to possible financial crimes is never a good idea. If they tell you to knock something off be glad that's all it was and move on.
Currency Boundaries are Dangerous (Score:2)
The government doesn't care when you trade bitcoins amongst yourselves, but if you *exchange* them either way for government currency, there are problems. In this case, you can trade USD for Bitcoins, and that's a big red flag.
Blanks (Score:2)
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Yes. The printer of stock certificates have infinite more lawyers.
It's not even to the stage of 'stocks' (Score:5, Insightful)
Bitcoin, until now, is still an UNREGISTERED and totally UNRECOGNIZED entity, according to the laws of the United States of America (since it's the US treasury we are talking, let's limit the discussion to the US laws).
Stocks, on the other hand, are items that are recognized under the United States' laws, and the issuance of stock, the printing of stock certs, and so forth, have to abide by the LAWS, as they were written when the certs were being printed.
In other words, the authority actually has NO JURISDICTION WHATSOEVER to interfere with the activities of that maker of Bitcoin Token since what he did was akin to making some toy coins, use for arcade machines.
It's true that he has less lawyers than the stock cert printers, but still, the authority just does not have ANY RIGHT to interfere with an LAWFUL ACTIVITY (making toy coin) of a LAWFUL COMPANY (which is dully registered according to the laws where the company is located).
The United States of America of today is becoming more and more like the China that I ran away from, back in the early 1970's.
Back when I first reached the U. S. of A., it was a country in which the LAWS were still obeyed.
Back when I ran away from China, it was a country where LAWS WERE MEANINGLESS.
Now it looks like the United States of America is trying very hard to change role with that of China.
While China is getting more and more civilized (they still have a VERY LONG WAY TO GO), America is behaving more and more rogue.
It saddens me a lot watching my adopted country slowly turns into the country where I was born.
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Well, that is not entirely accurate. Bitcoin gets Department of Justice, Securities and Exchange Commission endorsements [newsday.com]
The *LAWS* still do not recognize Bitcoin !! (Score:2, Informative)
The Department of Justice and Securities and Exchange Commission are telling a U.S. Senate committee that Bitcoins are legitimate financial instruments, boosting prospects for wider acceptance of the virtual currency.
Representatives from the agencies told the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs ahead of a hearing Monday that the digital money offers benefits and carries risks, like any other online-payment system, according to letters they released before the meeting.
That was just last month and that is the problem.
No, it's NOT a problem.
Everything boils down to the LAWS.
Do the LAWS of the United States of America recognize the entity by the name of "BITCOIN" ?
Yes or No ?
Whatever department of the government can "endorse" anything they like, but if the *LAWS* do not recognize that very thing, the "endorsement" amounts to nothing.
What the GP has stated was correct. They have absolutely NO jurisdiction over the coin maker.
And I am reading some asshats' post below saying about "minting coins with other people's money", I
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I sincerely hope you know the answer...
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It's clearly as simple as this:
(a) We want to control everything important
(b) Bitcoin is becoming important
(c) We will do whatever necessary to control Bitcoin
Signed the guys collectively possessing the the most powerful expression of the 'throw a fence around it if it's valuable' gene.
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commercially offering IOU's falls under quite many laws, fucker.
though what he does is essentially from what I understand run a bitcoin exchange. that also is under several laws - just because they call it bitcoin or mintkoin or spaghetting doesn't make it exempt from those.
otherwise fraudsters would be giving you kredit kords and stÃks and saying that rules don't apply....
look man, these guys and gals running bitcoins-from-a-box stunts at happenings know fairly well that they couldn't just put up a we
Re:The *LAWS* still do not recognize Bitcoin !! (Score:4, Insightful)
Do the LAWS of the United States of America recognize the entity by the name of "BITCOIN" ?
No, just like how they don't recognise an entity by the name of "Google". Absurdly, they still claim Google has to follow the law!
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I agree, however, if the farmers don't regulate the feed then they lose a prime way to ensure the cattle don't wander off and survive on their own. Note that the arcade tokens say something to the effect, "Not redeemable for cow feed" on them.
Re:Stock Certificates (Score:4, Funny)
How is what he was doing different from printing a stock certificate?
Nobody prints stock anymore. It's all done with a confirmation that you hold X shares.
On a different tangent, the value and desirability of a token you can no longer order means they will skyrocket in value. Well played, federable gummint.
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This is one guy making physical objects. So he's low hanging fruit. The Bitcoin network is distributed over many clients worldwide. Difficult to make a dent in that. If you can't shut down Bittorrent you go after the Pirate Bay. If you can't shut down Bitcoin you go after a harmless one man operation.
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I have stock certificates, laminated and framed, from a former start-up. They do exist, and in general your broker can send some to you if for some crazy reason you want them.
And "money laundering" laws should have a floor. Sure, make the business track if a given customer does more than $10,000 in business in a month and report that - that's fine at that scale - but how is this different from, say, restaurant gift cards?
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because stock isn't money...
it's more like bearer bonds (Score:4, Insightful)
And issuance of stock certificates. This person is allowed to continue his work if he works according to the regulations.
Same with those who issue stock certificates.
Bearer bonds are so heavily regulated that you never see them anymore in the US, some say they are essentially illegal in the US now.
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More aptly, how is this different than printing out a paper wallet [bitcoin.it] for a friend?
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More aptly, how is this different than printing out a paper wallet [bitcoin.it] for a friend?
No different really, other than the jackboot of the SEC has not stomped on anybody's paper wallet yet, at least not that I am aware of.
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Or sending a purse filled with dollar bills?
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How is what he was doing different from printing a stock certificate?
If you are talking about the publicly traded variety of stock, you have to go through all sorts of government hoops [wikipedia.org] (that link is just the tip of the iceberg) and get all manner of government approval. Bitcoin should not require any of that, for one because you are not possessing a share of equity in a large entity, but you are possessing one bit of something that has value in itself. Before going into what constitutes value, let's just stipulate that the Subjective Theory of Value applies here.
In other
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in the way that he is not selling stocks, which has it's own set of rules to jump through.
money transmitting rules might even be the easiest, though he would need to keep records of id's.
easiest would be to just take bitcoin for bitcoin, but that has way less usefulness.
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Money is speech in the same way that the Supreme Court ruled that education should be separate but equal, or that Dred Scott was property.
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Money is certainly "political expression" when used to pay for political expression. You seem to think that's foolish, but fail to provide an alternative for consideration. Should political newspaper ads be outlawed, such that only those who can buy an entire newspaper company have freedom of the press? Where do you draw the line, without outright censorship of some means of political expression?
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Money is speech in the same way that the Supreme Court ruled that education should be separate but equal, or that Dred Scott was property.
No, spending money is speech. Coining money is covered in Article I of the Constitution. That said, people should be free to exchange in whatever they mutually define as money and save that dirty federal coined variety for the tax man.
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Money is speech in the same way that the Supreme Court ruled that education should be separate but equal, or that Dred Scott was property.
No, spending money is speech. Coining money is covered in Article I of the Constitution. That said, people should be free to exchange in whatever they mutually define as money and save that dirty federal coined variety for the tax man.
Oops, that was supposed to be a response to The Cat (19816).
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Easy-Peasy!
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"Vote Ima Krook for Senate!" <-- political message
Did I just spread that message without spending money? I suppose it did cost something - an infinitesimally small depreciation on this workstation, plus a similarly tiny fraction of electricity, internet, & rent bills.
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I don't think you deserved a -1 for that, but you do deserve to be woken up to the harsh reality of the world where the US courts do whatever the fuck pleases them at the time and the government doesn't give a shit about what they said the law was yesterday when your tax dollars come to arrest you today.
The judge would likely rule that bitcoin is money then imprison you for contempt of court until you stop talking about Citizens United.
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Re:You can't have your cake and eat it too.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Bitcoin users are not against regulation per se, but the regulators must be able to explain why they should have that power.
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Because we, as a civilized society, look down on things like human trafficking, organized crime, extortion and so on. These activities require the ability to transact large amounts of value in untraceable ways, and so to the best of their ability the government try to prevent that.
This isn't about stopping this guy from doing what he was doing, it was about making him follow the same rules that everyone else who does similar things follow, which is more about keeping records than anything else. If he doesn'
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There are two people involved:
Incorrect. If BitCoin is a currency, then subsequent recipients are involved. This is only one link in the transaction chain for that "currency".
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FINCEN is not some random federal agency.
You not knowing of it only speaks to your ignorance and not the unimportance of the agency.
That's a fair point.
I need to learn more about these agencies. Can you give me a list of of the ones that have law-making authority over our lives?
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A crash course in Administrative Law for 'ya. Regulatory agencies have it, within their powers, to clarify laws with policy statements.
See: "Chevron"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevron_U.S.A.,_Inc._v._Natural_Resources_Defense_Council,_Inc [wikipedia.org].
Here's a simple example: Here in Arizona we have a thing called, "Smoke Free Arizona," a voter-initiated law that makes smoking illegal in most occupied public places. That law says some fairly big things about where you can and can't smoke, but there were no fine det