The first one of those emails is taking back all your account history since we enabled trade notification setting again.

We were busy with many things and unfortunately trade notification were taken out of the top of the todo list for a while. It's now back, and working. That first email contained all your trades until now, next ones will be sent every 10 minutes or so.

We prevent use of the yubikey on other sites to limit (slightly) risks of phishing. Making it normal to enter your yubikey code on other sites might be a risk, and considering recent phishing attempts I wouldn't be surprised we start seeing phishing attempts targetting yubikeys.

Releasing some more content/stuff sounds like a good idea, let me help a bit and see what happens.

You need to contact the other exchange to have them credit the bitcoins. Bitcoin addresses do not expire, and they are likely to have already dealt with similar issues (when we were "expiring" addresses, we had a lot of people sending funds again weeks later).

Sans oublier toutes les réglementations/déclarations/etc nécessaires qui feraient fuir toute personne voulant échanger des bitcoins.

It's only the start date, where both parties will provide elements under their possession to argument. Chances are it'll take a few weeks before a definitive answer is found.

Vu que tous nos clients euro sont encore en USD nous autorisons temporairement le retrait d'USD en Euro. L'idée est de se débarasser de toute conversion qui ne fait pas partie d'un achat ou une vente de bitcoin.

Sinon je ne serait pas à l'audience, vu que je suis à Tokyo et je ne peux malheureusement pas me permettre le luxe de voyager en France en ce moment... mais je suis de très près

Non, l'échange entre devises n'est pas possible directement, vu que cela serait illégal sans être une banque, même à Tokyo ou Hong Kong

This all depends on the final legal status. Law is known to not care much about technical sense.

All currencies except PLN are eligible for international withdraw.

USD also has deposits/withdraw via Dwolla, Paxum and LR.

Deposits for CAD and EUR are also possible via Paxum. We'll add Paxum withdrawals in those currencies eventually (once there are enough deposits).

GBP deposits are possible via Barclays, and withdrawals will be implemented soon.

CAD deposits and withdraws will be possible soon via a new bank in Canada (things have been moving slowly).

EUR deposits and withdraws will be possible once we settle the case with the French bank, or once we open those in Poland.

PLN deposits and withdraws are live via Bitomat acquisition.

Things are a bit complex than that.

In France there are laws ("droit au compte") that says that any company or individual should be able to open a bank account. When CIC first closed our bank account, strangely, no bank in France wanted to open a bank account for us anymore (especially when we reached the bitcoin part of the explanation).
We then went to the National Bank ("Banque de France") and asked them to assign us a bank. The first bank refused, so the National Bank re-assigned us to CIC, which was not allowed to say no anymore.

Thing is they said no. We opened an emergency court case as not having a bank account is harmful for our business, the court said that the bank was indeed required to act as the law says, and not as it feels. Bank lost court case, opened account, appealed, lost appeal, closed account, got sued again, lost again, re-opened account.

Now, the bank is saying that its only reason for closing the bank account is because we have an activity similar to a bank without being registered as a bank, since we allow people to buy a virtual currency called "bitcoin".
The definition of "virtual currency" under French law do not match bitcoin at all, and the court generally agrees, while saying it is not able to make this kind of decision. On request of both us and the bank, a regular court (as opposed to emergency court) will have to decide if bitcoin is indeed a virtual currency or not.

For information we haven't spent one cent so far on this (the bank has been required to pay us however, each time they lost). Unlike USA, in France the one who wins a court case is the one who is following the law, not the one with more money.

As many have been talking about all kind of things let me add a few points.

• No, I am not doing this alone. I have people with me, some with deep understanding of bitcoin, some with deep understanding of french laws.
• I have a few years of experience running businesses, it's however my first time going in court for a system similar to bitcoin
• All the information published here (including the court decision) are public and published by the French tribunal too, since it's not "ongoing litigation" as someone said, but a closed case.
• Technically you do not own bitcoins, but you own keys to those coins, which have an intrinsic value equivalent to the controlled "coins". That makes stealing a wallet equivalent to stealing the coins. This has nothing to do with the defense anyway at this point, just thought I'd fuel a bit the troll.
• If anyone wants to help, it's welcome. If you could just avoid citing other countries laws, but EU regulations and/or French law it'd be even better.

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Now, the bank claiming "bitcoin is a virtual currency" seems a bit far fetched, as they had no supporting material other than internet articles and similar things. The law defining a "virtual currency" in France is even more strict than the related EU regulation, and goes even further in a direction opposite to bitcoin.

Chances are the court will say "we never had to deal with Bitcoin before, we need new laws". We'll see how this goes.

You don't own bitcoins. You own keys that allows you to give authorization to other people's key to use some coins. The coins really are in the blockchain, which is everywhere.

If this happens we'll probably stop operating in France. This has no impact in Japan where we are doing other efforts to get a status for bitcoins by talking directly with the FSA (not the UK one, the Japanese one), MOF (Ministry of Finance) and KLFB (Kanto Local Finance Bureau).


I'd doubt that since French law is based on EU regulation, which states a few things that bitcoin is not. On top of that French laws define virtual currencies as a form of debt (so you can cash out anytime from the issuer), which is clearly not what bitcoin is.

In Japan we will most likely see new laws and new regulations adapted to bitcoin (nothing is set yet, talks are still in progress). Other countries could see the same thing if current laws are deemed "not enough".

Anyway if you just read the law, Bitcoin is not a virtual currency.

We are basing our defense on the fact Bitcoins are not issued for money, but issued ("created" or "mined") for "free" (in exchange of a specific work, in fact, but anyone can have their computer do it and expect to have bitcoins within a more or less long timeframe). Because of this, one bitcoin (or 0.00000001 bitcoin) has no defined value.

There is an API for redeemable codes that should help you making this instant, just let me know ( admin@mtgox.com ) if you need any help with this.

If bitcoin is an electronic currency, it means we will have to report to the different countries of origin of our customers the identity of anyone buying, selling or owning bitcoins, how much they own, etc. just like banks are doing in most countries.
Not mentioning that exchange or online storage of bitcoins would require to be a bank, which involves a lot of fees and time (can take up to 5 years to create one). Banks as we know can do that as they run fractional reserve and can spend the money you put with them, but bitcoin won't allow that (it's here to prevent this kind of nonsense from happening).

It would also make transit of bitcoin between countries subject of customs declaration requirement, and a lot of more crap that would be bad for everyone.


Bitcoin is not a money, it's bitcoin. Don't try to interpret it with current laws, we'll most likely need a new set of laws to accommodate the way it works and the anonymity required.

We have noticed recently a surge in fraudulent deposits of funds in Australia, so this might be linked.

Some of those have passed through our anti-fraud system (a bit less than AU$1000 worth of funds which we have taken as loss), which we have been tuning to detect this kind of fraudulent activity. We are working with our provider in Australia (Technocash) on reducing the volume of fraudulent activity (as we can detect those in advance with better accuracy, it becomes not profitable enough for fraudsters and they find other ways to cash out their illegal money).

It wouldn't play good for the bank's image either. They opened back a new account already, however it'll take a few days until we receive the access card for online access and can resume normal activity.


What matters is not what you say, but what the law says.