davout
was not aware of that specific ruling. Thanks for posting (and translating). Does this ruling set a precedent for for other county rulings? Is this the only legal ruling on bitcoin??
I don't know if there are other rulings, I believe not outside of this series (a couple of preliminary rulings were made prior to this one, but they are all summed up in the one I posted which is the final ruling).
I don't know if this ruling sets a precedent.
What I know is that the legislation is supposed to be consistent accross Europe, Paymium (the company I work for) got some specialized legal advice regarding this matter, and we found that in order to operate the Bitcoin-Central exchange securely (as in secure for our users fiat funds), we had to implement some legal compliance steps that go way beyond implementing some KYC/AML/CTF procedures according to the Payment Services Providers and Electronic Money Services European regulations.
I'm pretty sure Mark has said before that they intend to seek licensing as a money service business in the US but that it's a process which happens at state level and is quite expensive.
I don't believe this to be true, the MSB registration form is fillable online and it's like two pages long. And if Bitinstant did it, and if karpeles threw 10kBTC at the Bitcoin Foundation I really see no excuse for mtgox to at least try it.
If you read the whole court ruling you'll see that at some points karpeles outright
lies to the court, so I would take his word with a grain of salt.
Page 7
Qu'à aucun moment un client du site ou la société TIBANNE ne peut effectuer ou initier un paiement sur son compte bancaire
[Macaraja says that] it is not possible for a customer of the [mtgox] website or the TIBANNE company to initiate a payment to its bank account
Oh, and another gem on page 11
Que, de plus, ayant reconnu qu'elle effectuait des placements à court terme avec les sommes reçues des acheteurs de bitcoins, la société ...
That, additionally, having admitted to using the bitcoin buyers funds in short term financial investments, the company ...
In other words mtgox is investing
your money.
Whether or not they're currently licensed in the US has no impact on their obligations to comply with Japanese AML/CTF/KYC requirements
Again, these regulations are relevant to licensed financial institutions, and their contractual partners. I have no proof that mtgox is not a contractual partner of a licensed financial institution (absence of proof is obviously not a proof of absence) but I feel that if they did land such a partnership they would have at least bragged about it, and they would be required to include it in their ToS.
If you look at institutions like PayPal, you'll see that they can be licensed very differently from one location to the next - here, they're regulated as an authorised deposit-taking institution and regulated under the Banking Act - and that the restrictions on their operations vary by jurisdiction.
Again, what bothers me here is not that mtgox is unlicensed, it is that they appear to not even try (remember if Bitinstant did it, why would mtgox fail if it tried).
