I'm a reporter at The Wall Street Journal and I'm reaching out on this forum in hopes of finding sources who may have concerns when it comes to consumer protections for Bitcoin users -- I'm especially looking for people in the U.S. who may have lost money/felt scammed and are willing to share their story, as well as Bitcoin users who may want to comment on the recent push by some regulators who say there should be protections in place to safeguard consumers -- is this a good idea? Why or why not? Please feel free to email me directly at
Stephanie.Armour@wsj.com.
hi stephanie, this forum + reddit + irc will provide pretty much all the info you need about people's opinions.
noone will agree on what the best and only way to proceed is. it is also not likely that the government's of the world will ever have a unified solution either.
when bitcoins first started people truly enjoyed the idea of "privacy and anonymity" which is still very important to the heart of the bitcoin community. what happened is that because the community relied on privacy and being anonymous too much (and bitcoins were worth very little) they trusted random, unproven people with their bitcoins. "if i want to be anonymous so should the person holding my bitcoins". that's why everything until 2013 has been run mostly by "anonymous" and or incompetent people, with no accountability, amateurs. with bitcoins being an experiment they were worth very little and noone expected them to grow so big, so fast. people didn't take security seriously and the people offering services with were either way over their head or just thieves.
the current laws already apply to bitcoin: don't commit fraud, don't commit theft and so forth. so it's not like any new laws really need to be written but people need to either 1) hold bitcoins themselves 2) only give their bitcoins to companies that are transparent, have the correct team in place and are a real, serious business.
as bitcoin gains value and acceptance many things will work themselves out on their own (through a very heavy toll on the public) but some regulation won't be bad.
it's just that the framework is already there to insure protection. it's up to the company or service you are dealing with to hold up their end of the contract! i think the consumer now has a choice to deal with companies that have positive reputation and care about accountability: bitpay, coinbase, bitstamp, many others or deal with amateurs like gox or give their trust to complete strangers like inputs.io or mybitcoin. the full spectrum of trust to shadiness exists.
there have been many scams in the "securities" section as well. some of the scams are
unintentional while others were
fraud to begin with (see
labcoin as an example). companies like BFL, Avalon etc have already broken real laws already in place. companies doing illegal things with bitcoins is no different that companies doing illegal things with any other currency or form of payment. as i've mentioned earlier - now is the turning point where people don't really want to lose their digital currency and people are going to be much more careful about who they trust with what. eventually, things will work themselves out but proper guidance/"regulation" can be used as assistance. it would be a shame if regulation is used to kill innovation.
-if you do want to use any quote in your article (i've never been featured in wsj) just use my username
good luck with your piece, please make it as factual and unbiased as possible. long live bitcoin!
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