Bitcoin Forum

http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-foundation-forms-committees-for-legal-defence-and-regulation/

You would never know the foundation is international from this parochial story/press release.

"“We’re putting together a team of people to engage regulators across the country in a conversation – to try and be proactive about bitcoin education,” said Santori.

He explained the committees are trying to get people from every US state involved, because laws and regulations can vary wildly from state to state.

“We need people in every state because it’s our aim to make sure all the voices get heard, not just the loudest.”"

Meanwhile from the foundation website: "Bitcoin Foundation standardizes, protects and promotes the use of Bitcoin cryptographic money for the benefit of users worldwide."

Matonis has a lot to repair in his new role.

In fairness, Marco's committee is focused on regulatory affairs, and the situation in the USA with respect to regulation is far by the most urgent to address. The USA is not really a "united states" at all when it comes to AML laws. It's more like 48 little independent countries, that happen to collectively hold one of the worlds largest economies.

In contrast, my understanding is that the EU SEPA zone unified regulatory oversight to the extent that you can be licensed in one country and take customers in the others, i.e. the EU is "one big country" to a Bitcoin exchange.

Given this setup, it's clear why the US is going to soak up so much time for exchanges.

To sum it up...

No Bitcoin Foundation = Nothing available for a government attack to be focused on = No need for a legal defense = No need to spend bitcoins on bitcoin regulation

So, every dollar spent to help the government regulate bitcoin is a dollar less for bitcoin development.

+1

"help the government regulate bitcoin" is exactly what they are doing, and it is a sadomasochistic, internally inconsistent, suicidal, paradoxical and oxy-moronic exercise in futility.

Please focus on developing and promoting the technology, not on supporting a group of people that make a living by forcing peaceful people to follow an irrational set of rules that suits only the governments agenda.

Can't get more parochial than that. Not only is the world bigger than the foundation can imagine but so is the very country it obsesses on.

I suggest you listen to this interview with Jon Matonis, who now runs the Foundation:

https://soundcloud.com/mindtomatter/e23-2-setting-the-agenda-with

He spends a large chunk of the entire (45 minute!) interview talking about internationalisation and how he wants to make the Foundation more international and less US oriented than today. He's your kind of guy.

Thanks for the link. It's a really good interview, nicely managed and edited - nothing wasted. Yes, I'm a big Matonis fan, at least in this honeymoon period.      :)

I'll listen to it all again - a lot of ground was covered, as you know.

I very much like his international focus, even as I cringe at the idea of compartmentalizing dirtspace "chapters" that reify existing nation state boundaries and the bureacracy that goes with them. Messy stuff, inevitably.

I think I heard "The membership of the BTC foundation is 60% non-U.S." and "foundation meetings take place in the U.S." - an awkward situation that would seem to be easily solvable with teleconferences.

Cyber is as cyber does. There's still a bit of a smoke-filled room aura about the foundation. Very encouraging to have Matonis' energy though. Things are looking up.

DviceI would personally become more of a supporter of the bitcoin foundation if they issue guides as free advice on legal, accounting & tax situations.

It'd be great if they help to define what ppossible interpretations are and perhaps conduct surveys of what people are doing.

They could release research reports on different approaches.  I believe this is how the bitcoin foundation can serve the public.

I'll leave it up to the bitcoin foundation to figure out which ecominies & jurisdiction would benefit (and possible donate) most from these types of activities.