2013-06-13 Latest from FinCEN

[600watt]

Now another question what if we never change to fiat and use the bitcoins to make purchases lets say for non-business related expenses?

Hey! Look over there! *quickly runs the other way*

heh. I'm not a lawyer or a tax accountant. What you are asking is uncharted territory. Gov.s aren't stupid. They are going to demand their piece of the action one way or another. Once enough people start using Bitcoins in their daily transactions the Gov. will notice and demand their taxes. It will probably take some time though. Perhaps the day will come when the Gov. will accept the taxes on the bitcoin portion of your income in bitcoins. Most likely though, they will factor in some average exchange rate like they do for capital gains made on multiple stock purchases all liquidated at once.

if you buy something and pay, the taxes are included. it doesn´t matter with what you pay. most people use money, but you could also try to pay with grandpa´s stamp collection. if the shop takes it - fine. only because you use bitcoin does not avoid any taxes at all. (in addition, the bitcoin may have been obtained with dollars you owned legally, therefore all taxes paid) the shop that receives an payment in bitcoin owes the same amount of taxes to the irs as an other for the same deal.

[telemaco]

I suppose if you have built your world around the idea that the government is an evil institution who's secret plans are to get you, then you will read this as evidence of their scheming.
Here in the real world a document like this is a welcomed addition to the legal precedent. It is the most positive document I have yet seen from a regulatory body. You can all send FinCen a tip from the profit you are about to realize due to this.

If your problem is that any regulation is unwelcome, then stick to shitcoins. Under no legal scenario are you going to be able to make fiat money off bitcoin and not pay taxes. The moment you turn your BTC into $USD you are using THEIR money and must play by THEIR rules.  You can't have it both ways.

+1

with a few sentences they could have done much harm to the bitcoin price, which is in some critical phase anyway. and they know that. if they would want to destroy it anyway, there would be no need for this soft talk. they decided not to destroy/fight/harm it. that is a good sign. there is some protection/pro bitcoin lobbying going on already. maybe the governments actually welcome this new competitor to old-fashioned banking. bankers have lots of political power. sometimes it is not really clear who is the one with more power: bankers or politicians. politicians know that we know and that is emberrassing. if a competitor for the banking moloch is rising, it can be used by politicians as a tool to regain some influence. if there is a power you are struggling with, anything that weakens your opponent is welcome. the higher ranking a politician is the more strategic his views are. going after bitcoin only because some traditonal bankers say so would be a terrible strategy for anyone who feels the power of the bankers daily.

this does not mean that all the bankers hate bitcoin. most of them think in terms of profit. if they can profit with bitcoin they will do so. bookshops sell kindle devices. banks will sell/handle bitcoin. they will be happy to dig their own gaves as long as they get payed for...

+10
Great Post

[BitcoinAshley]

However, I would like to close with a challenge to our great innovators: extend your focus to devising creative solutions for preventing the abuse of virtual currencies by criminals, such as those who would exploit children. We all stand to benefit from such innovation, and the related transparency and integrity to our financial system.

this is warspeak. The translation is:

Make us a proposal about the conditions of your surrender.

It means they expect us to implement a coin tainting system.

GOOD LUCK WITH THAT! 

[cbeast]

I kinda wonder why there is any interest in bitcoin. With a market cap of only a billion, it wouldn't pay the catering for the conference.

[Severian]

its all about the FIAT

Yepper. And Bitcoin's existence threatens the reputation of those that issue the fiat, unless they can control the price or the gain a significant share of the Bitcoin supply.

You glossed over the important part of the excerpt:

A change in views about the creditworthiness of these issuers (and the associated virtual exchange rate variability) would threaten to undermine the role of money in providing a single unit of account as a common financial denominator for the whole economy.

They know they could lose the store but I don't think they have anything to fear. I expect that the "REGULATE ME, PLEASE!" crowd will save them the worry and just hand Bitcoin over to them in their zeal to be compliant.

[cbeast]

They know they could lose the store but I don't think they have anything to fear. I expect that the "REGULATE ME, PLEASE!" crowd will save them the worry and just hand Bitcoin over to them in their zeal to be compliant.

If this post were from a noob I would take exception. At this point I will scratch my head. My understanding is that it would take a major fork to hand over the keys to regulators. I don't see that happening. Voluntary compliance should be more than enough to satisfy them, especially if they offer monetary incentives to do so.

[farfiman]

from the cover page...

UNITED STATES INSTITUTE OF PEACE

Sounds like 1984 all over again.

"The United States Institute of Peace (USIP) was established by Congress in 1984......."   

[Binford 6100]

So when it says, "Those who are intermediaries in the transfer of virtual currencies from one person to
another person, or to another location, are money transmitters that must register with FinCEN as
MSBs, unless an exception applies" does this apply to miners? If so they are most definitely trying to kill bitcoin as the network security would be destroyed by such a regulation on miners.

it might be as well targeting everyone running a full node, validating and forwarding transactions in the p2p network. miners who do not listen to transaction broadcasts, do not store blockchain and do not validate transactions, just work in a pool, are not affected. pool operator however distributes mining reward and could be intermediaries. so, i would worry about pools and full nodes. pretty much the whole network.

[Bigpiggy01]

Interesting read 

http://www.fincen.gov/contactus.html

I wonder which one of those inquiry lines can provide clarification on what's what in relation to Bitcoin.

[Severian]

Voluntary compliance should be more than enough to satisfy them

We'll have to disagree on arbitrary authority ever being satisfied. I've never known it to happen.

Bitcoin under "voluntary compliance" (an oxymoron, btw) is like taking the best engine ever built and unplugging half of the sparkplugs from the distributor. It would decrease the value of the engine, as has happened with Bitcoin under voluntary compliance thus far.

[Schrankwand]

The main problem with regulation that there are lots of people regulating who don't get it.


Basically, again, this woman is talking about children and her wide interpretation means that every miner is a money transmitter. Consider this: The miner creates a block which includes transactions. Anyone who creates transactions is theoretically transmitting money now.


That is the idiotic part. The woman does not get Bitcoin. It is not a virutal currency that is emitted by an entity. THIS is the problem. If the FinCEN regulates LR, that is kind of alright. There is a service provider giving out a currency and therefore its emitter has certain rights and regulations to uphold.

For an exchange, yes, I also think that a bank should be regulated. But the non-existence of an emittent and the handling by decentralized networks is unknown in our systems before. It is a completely new variable, that with old thinking, will be squashed.


Apart from the usual propaganda talk (Those who exploit children), it demonstrates a clear misunderstanding in how laws will affect this thing. Apart from the fact that the "child exploitation" market is not even financially very relevant, they are all already taken care of by asking for AML laws. There is nothing new needed. No new regulation at all. the only thing necessary is existing exchange businesses running compliance. New regulations regarding Bitcoin will, in every case, miss the mark and the system.

But is this going to be a problem? No. Not for Bitcoin. BTC will go back to obscurity and stay where it is. It will say "Fuck you." And with this single move, that a mienr could be considered a money transmitter, the governments will have created the ultimate underground system. Basically, they declare it illegal to mine it and emit it, because mining it is transmitting it. And there you go: The system has been set up. Instead of creating a legitimate system that is like cash, they have created a virtual Hawala banking system in the underground.

[cypherdoc]

Dear Jennifer Shasky Calvery,

Why haven't any of the CEO's, chairmen, or directors of HSBC, Wachovia or other banks caught money laundering over the past several years gotten thrown in prison or personally paid enormous fines?

Until these injustices are remedied you can't expect the Bitcoin community to cooperate.

[Rampion]

I kinda wonder why there is any interest in bitcoin. With a market cap of only a billion, it wouldn't pay the catering for the conference.

Because anybody with half a brain can see its game-changing potential. It can subvert the current power structures, which are dependent from financial lobbies that control the usd

[interlagos]

...
Basically, again, this woman is talking about children and her wide interpretation means that every miner is a money transmitter. Consider this: The miner creates a block which includes transactions. Anyone who creates transactions is theoretically transmitting money now.
...

Well technically it's not that simple, transactions that miner includes in a block are already transmitted by the network and most of the nodes have them. Miner only provides a time stamp (in terms of blockchain's block count) for a bunch of transactions by publishing a solution to the proof of work problem along with already existing and already transmitted transactions. So technically miners do not transmit transactions (full nodes do), they only time-stamp them.

Dear Jennifer Shasky Calvery,

Why haven't any of the CEO's, chairmen, or directors of HSBC, Wachovia or other banks caught money laundering over the past several years gotten thrown in prison or personally paid enormous fines?

Until these injustices are remedied you can't expect the Bitcoin community to cooperate.

+1000

They really need to fix their own problems on the part of "integrity and transparency", as they claim in the document, before exploring new territories. Yeah and rename that "office of terrorism" too! I mean, who in their right mind would want to cooperate with an organization who reports to the office with such a name. Maybe it's a trap and we all will be later tagged by the Prism as "aiding the enemy"

I'll just leave it here:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=KP6pBS6uptE

[Micky25]

What do you guys think about a business like mine, Coingig.com, we allow sellers to create a store and sell products to other users. We have an intermediary escrow system that keeps the bitcoin the buyer pays and we don't release it to the seller until the buyer has received their item.

Are we classified as a money transmitter? I would guess so, what are everyone's thoughts, what is the best way to work with FINCEN to remain open?

Any help is greatly appreciated.

if you touch fiat then i would call your countries financial authorities. if you only accept bitcoin, don't worry

I'm afraid it's probably not so easy. Point 3 is highly ambiguous and leaves lots of doors open.

De-Centralized Virtual Currencies

A final type of convertible virtual currency activity involves a de-centralized convertible virtual currency (1) that has no central repository and no single administrator, and (2) that persons may obtain by their own computing or manufacturing effort.

{1} A person that creates units of this convertible virtual currency and uses it to purchase real or virtual goods and services is a user of the convertible virtual currency and not subject to regulation as a money transmitter.

{2} By contrast, a person that creates units of convertible virtual currency and sells those units to another person for real currency or its equivalent is engaged in transmission to another location and is a money transmitter.

{3} In addition, a person is an exchanger and a money transmitter if the person accepts such de-centralized convertible virtual currency from one person and transmits it to another person as part of the acceptance and transfer of currency, funds, or other value that substitutes for currency.

[cbeast]

I kinda wonder why there is any interest in bitcoin. With a market cap of only a billion, it wouldn't pay the catering for the conference.

Because anybody with half a brain can see its game-changing potential. It can subvert the current power structures, which are dependent from financial lobbies that control the usd

They should have thought of that before they let Al Gore invent the internets. They haven't really discussed any game-changing potential, possibly because of the half-brain requirement. If they did, they would be talking about all the beneficial things crypto-currencies offer. Instead, they frame Bitcoin as a foreign currency sponsored by "all kinds of mean nasty ugly looking people."

Again, this "conference" sounds like it's nothing but a lobbyist effort to kill Bitcoin with no evidential reasoning. Hopefully, they will someday focus on administering the network competitively as it is designed rather than fighting it idealistically which they have no moral standing to do so. There are real threats out there now from banks like HSBC that need attention.

[Micky25]

....cut

bitcoin is not a threat because:

1) the banks only care about FIAT.
2) when you buy bitcoin you hand over FIAT to another person... its the same as buying a tin of baked beans.. money moves from one account to another. but essentialy stays within the financial system, which they love.
3) bitcoin can help banks. instead of polish, mexican, asian workers putting FIAT into envelopes to send to their birth countries. they will in the future buy a bitcoin locally (keeping FIAT in country) and allow the bitcoin move across borders.
4) as long as the gateways in and out of FIAT are secure. they dont care about other currencies.
5) as long as minimum wage laws exist the 99% population that work hourly wages will get paid in FIAT so bitcoin will not "take over" the world.. but may when more popular, work along side it.
6) fincen (america) is only as interested in bitcoin as interested in the EURO.

....cut

HELP banks? How? By taking away their business? I'm sure, they will literally smash in your door to get this service.

Do you think its particularly difficult for them to transfer money in other countries? Why? Because its so expensive? For who?
Do you think that when the asian worker comes to them and wants to send money home, they say: "Oh no, not you again. Please go away, we don't like this kind of business, its too much work. Do it in bitcoins."
(Furthermore, I wonder how the asian family handles bitcoins and what the merchants at the local farmer market think about bitcoin payments.)

Don't get me wrong, I highly sympathise with your ideas, but I fear, they are a bit quixotic in some parts.

However, I would like to close with a challenge to our great innovators: extend your focus to devising creative solutions for preventing the abuse of virtual currencies by criminals, such as those who would exploit children. We all stand to benefit from such innovation, and the related transparency and integrity to our financial system.

this is warspeak. The translation is:

Make us a proposal about the conditions of your surrender.

It means they expect us to implement a coin tainting system.

GOOD LUCK WITH THAT!  

There is no need of a coin tainting system. Through the full controll of all exchanges (work in progress), all coins which go through them will be "tainted".

This will be the time when they come to tear down the last pillar - mining. They will knock on your door and say: "Hi Grumpy! We saw that you were quite lucky lately and put some nice chunks of bitcoins in your online wallet. Congratulations. Lets talk about this, we are sure you understand its inappropriate that individuals create value out of nothing and distribute it. Imagine people start printing their own dollars, haha."

[Severian]

There is no need of a coin tainting system. Through the full controll of all exchanges (work in progress), all coins which go through them will be "tainted"

Coinbase comes to mind.

[BCB]

This is my favorite quote:

"FinCEN’s guidance explains that administrators or exchangers of virtual currencies have
registration requirements and a broad range of AML program, recordkeeping, and reporting
responsibilities. Those offering virtual currencies must comply with these regulatory
requirements, and if they do so, they have nothing to fear from Treasury."

"Virtual currencies are a financial service, and virtual currency administrators and exchangers are
financial institutions."

"we see virtual currency administrators and exchangers as a
type of money services business. These businesses are as much a part of the financial framework
as any other type of financial institution. As such, they have the same obligations as other
financial institutions, and the same obligations as any other money services business out there. "

"action taken against one financial institution [Liberty Reserve] and one type of
financial service ... [in a [ criminal case is [or a] regulatory action is – an
action against a particular violator. With this action we were not painting with a broad brush
again"

[BCB]

Jennifer Shasky Calvery, Director of the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network says:
" keep in mind the combined actions by the Department of Justice and FinCEN took down
a $6 billion money laundering operation (Liberty Reserve), the biggest in U.S. history."


However she somehow fails to mention:


Standard Chartered had processed $250bn
in illegal transactions over nearly a decade of business
 with US-sanctioned countries including Libya, Burma and Sudan.

Two HSBC affiliates sent nearly 25,000 transactions involving $19.4 billion
through their HBUS accounts over seven years without disclosing the transactions’
links to Iran.

HSBC cleared $290 million in “obviously suspicious travelers cheques”
that benefitted Russians “who claimed to be in the used car business.”


Previously HSBC processed $60 trillion (that it TRILLION with a "T") in wire transfer and account activity and
had a backlog of 17,000 unreviewed account alerts
regarding potentially suspicious activity
and a failure to conduct anti-money laundering due diligence
before opening accounts for HSBC affiliates.

?