A few people around here know about the legal drama currently happening in France between us (Tibanne, MtGox and Macaraja, the company representing us in France) and french banks.

A few weeks ago, our previous French bank closed our bank account despite knowing about our activity, which we explained fully before starting. We challenged this decision in court, to which the bank tried to defend itself by saying "Bitcoin is an electronic money, Macaraja is not a bank, therefore it's illegal for Macaraja to be handling this". The court replied that it was not up to the bank to decide this, and ordered the bank to re-open the account.

The bank announced us they would close the account again, and did an appeal. They lost their appeal but closed the account anyway.

We have then brought them once again in front of a court, which this time again decided against the bank.

Court decision (in French): http://demo.ovh.com/en/ec220dc8ec6778a9455fa7c77c991224/

Now, that would be quite boring if there wasn't a little extra this time.


The bank keeps saying "Bitcoin is an electronic money, we saw it on internet. The internet is never wrong." (or something like that) while we have been citing parts of the laws regarding electronic money and how they have a fixed value against a fiat currency, and are issued by a central authority and can be exchanged back for fiat at anytime (that's what the law says).
This time, the court was not able to find a solution for this, so it declared the issue shall be reviewed by a regular court (we were using the court for emergency matters, as not having a bank account is having an enormous negative impact on our business in Europe) starting September 13th.

Chances are it'll take a few weeks/months before a final decision is taken, however starting September 13th, a French court will review the question "Is bitcoin a virtual currency". If it is, it'll be a real pain to handle it (will require a lot of declarations, and bitcoin exchanges operating in France will need to collect KYC-like information on every single customer - not mentionning the fact of being an online wallet will equivalent to be a bank), however if it's not, the question will remain open (we'll just know it's not a virtual currency, which will ease the requirements).

While this is just a decision made in France, under French laws, as the first decision ever taken in the world, it may set a precedent for other countries to look at before ruling on the status of bitcoin on their own.

We have re-enabled the display of all deposit methods to everyone.

We'll limit deposit methods visible by default depending on user context. If you trade in AUD, I'd suggest you switch your main balance to AUD. See this announce for more details.

We are considering adding support for other digital currencies, however we are a bit worried by the security of those. We will probably have to wait for "merged mining".

MtGox is now accepting many new currencies, our multi-currency system is finally up and running, which means you can have "wallets" in any of our 15 new currencies (or USD) and deposit/withdraw directly from/to those via our bank in Hong Kong, or via our intermediate in Poland.

Official announcement: https://support.mtgox.com/entries/20413328-mt-gox-opens-15-new-currency-markets

You can choose on your settings page how deposits in different currencies are to be handled.

Transactions which "value date" is Friday are credited on saturday. International transactions incoming on friday tend to have their value date set on monday (this depends on what kind of agreement your bank has with Barclays). National UK transfers sent on friday are usually credited on saturday.

Whatever you do, ask your own lawyers anyway.

We are trying to check for things in the broadest range possible, and until the status of bitcoin is legally defined, accepting donations in bitcoins can be bad. It depends on context and various things.

Let me say it explicitly. I am not your legal counsel. I provide an opinion based on the feedback of different lawyer firms working together in the US for us, and they wouldn't advice anyone to accept bitcoins as donations.

Our US lawyers have confirmed that at this point it is not legal for an organization to accept donations in bitcoins.

They have hope this situation can be resolved, but in the meantime, in the USA, accepting bitcoin donations puts the organization at risk.

Barclays only export transactions on the next day, not on same day. I'll see what I can do.

You are a troll because you are trying to force others to follow your game. While I don't like following people in their game, especially when they act as a dumb mob acting on someone's agenda, you have a point by bringing to light some bad things.

I will act for the best of my employees, the company and bitcoin.

HSBC to HSBC transfers are cheaper, and usually done within less than one hour provided both the source and the destination branches are in business hours. If both accounts are under the same name and the amounts on the accounts are over a defined value, it is free.

Any other bank usually allow wire transfers to be processed within a few hours at most, except some bank with on purpose delays you can avoid by paying more (so-called expedited transfer).

B2B deposits are instant deposits, only possible between banks in Hong Kong. They are much cheaper and clear instantly. If you let us know you made such a deposit by email we can force the update and credit it faster. If not it'll be processed next day in worst case.

We are not turning a blind eye. I am just saying that at this point we have no idea of the whole situation.

While it is likely we will stop advertising on OnlyOneTv following this incident, we cannot take this decision without having a better overview of the situation, which seems impossible at this point since everyone is more busy fighting.

Taking decision too quickly based solely on accusations amplified by a group of professional (veteran) trolls is probably the last thing any business should do.

Thanks for the link, I'll have the training material for the support staff updated to include this kind of information.

HK deposits are processed in realtime, except for HK=>HK B2B deposits (they cannot be pushed automatically, so they are fetched in daily batches). UK Barclays is fetched once a day, and then manually checked as for some reason they truncate the description in the exports.

Uh?

UK Barclays pushes us data once a day.

HSBC in Hong Kong pushes us wires in realtime, as soon as your funds are received they are credited.

What I know of Bruce is what he did for the past months in Bitcoin, and I never had any report of Bruce stealing anything from anyone during that time frame.

As I said, we do not have enough information at this point to make any decision, especially when it comes to Bold Funding. We are still investigating this on our own and will provide updates once we reach a conclusion.

This is not an official statement, there is not enough information at this point for such a thing. I'll try to expose our views at this point.

For information we are not "sponsoring" Bruce Wagner, we are buying advertising on the Bitcoin Show as many others have been doing or are doing, which was (until now) the only show about bitcoins to have enough viewers to start to be interesting.

Many new things have appeared during on the forum during the past 2 or 3 days, so I'll list - quickly - those here:

• About thailand "boys", the evidence produced so far is far from being anything to worry about. We know Bruce is homosexual, as he's open about this, but this has nothing to do with bitcoins. It seems from what I saw that Thailand is more "gay-friendly" than USA and it could explain Bruce's presence there and why he likes that country. Anyway without more evidence there is nothing we can decide there.
• Bruce ran Bold Funding, which was unable to do what it claims to do. He was caught and judged for this, and I believe the justice does its thing. I know Bruce have been handling a lot of funds for bitcoin users while promoting it, and I never heard of him running with someone's cash (would have been easy enough). I didn't know what he did, but I know he did a great job in promoting bitcoins, allowing people to buy coins with cash without ever defrauding anyone.
• About the case in NY and some guy asking $500k in 2008, that case seems to be closed, open again, ... anyway it's not settled yet, and I'm wondering a bit about the guy on the other side. As long as the case is not settled there's no way to know who's wrong, and considering how long this have been running I wouldn't think it's anything serious.
• Finally about Bruce's affiliation with MyBitcoin, this is quite amusing. Not only this is highly unlikely considering technical details on the way MyBitcoin was run, but the "link" (TodWilliams?) is the most ridiculous thing I ever saw.

We are however aware of the image problem this represents, both for us and the bitcoin community as a whole, and are considering which steps should be taken in the future.

I do think that everyone around here are slightly too busy reading about Bruce (I don't know about you but I'm already bored of this) and ignoring some more important things happening on Bitcoin. We are about to start service for Bitomat users and open multi currency support, among other things, and various things are moving within the bitcoin community.

We announced we'll drop support of login/password access to the API within ~1 year.

We'll soon add a system that will every month list all the people using that method and send them an email introducing the API key identification system, to allow for a smooth migration.

No, we didn't.

However you may want to use a http library that understands location redirects, or drop the www. yourself.

Yes, it is because of the risk for transaction fees.

We'll add an option soon for low priority withdraws that can be as low as the smallest bitcoin unit, but may take a long time to be processed.

People are worried because as an exchange we could know when large buyers or sellers are getting ready to enter the market, and we could manipulate the market beforehand to profit from it.

That's one reason that makes it practically impossible for us to buy or sell bitcoins.