An interesting read about Bitcoin & legislation...

[ribuck]

... you could say that Bitcoins would enable easy funding for terrorists and organised crime ...

Any kind of money that works well for businesses and honest citizens will also work well for criminals. Goes without saying.

That's why govts should focus on the underlying crimes, not on the payment instrument.

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[klaus]

Very Interesting, thanks for posting.

[Big Time Coin]

/begin tl;dr version:

If you want to be in the business of buying and selling bitcoins, read these links and hire a lawyer or just forget about it.

Biz: Barrier to entry. 
Tech: Stifling of innovation in payment system technology. 
Politics: Hindrance of social progress, maintaining overreaching govt. control.

/end tl;dr

It bears mention that the U.K. and the E.U. are even more deeply in debt to major international banking interests than the U.S, even post-obamasaster.  As much as the U.S. govt. is bought by the banks, the E.U. govt. is even more so.

The fees that financial service firms pay to lawyers, bankers, and accountants to comply with the cited regulations and their ilk in all developed nations are, per annum, an order of magnitude larger than the entire market capitalization of the Bitcoin project.  The fees that these private firms charge the end-users for the simple, automated act of addition and subtraction in a ledger pass-through these regulatory compliance fees with a hefty markup. 

That's why we are seeing 3% tax on electronic money transactions for legitimate businesses, and 25% to 40% tax on criminal enterprises.  Taxes paid to the private firms that have "captured" the regulatory agencies like the FSA.  They spend a small portion of these fees on lobbying to maintain and expand the regulations that allow them to demand these "rents", as they are known in political science.  Another small chunk goes to the "no work" and "no show" employment contracts for former top regulators.

It's hundreds of billions of dollars a year.  Hundreds of thousands of middle to upper-class families are supported by these fees paid to private companies.  The right to collect fees taxes is created by administrative agencies in an almost entirely undemocratic fashion.  Agencies like the FSA.  These people are going to jealously protect their parasitic (value-extraction, no value added) role in the economy.  Entire careers and livelihoods depend on it, in numbers an order of magnitude larger than the number of bitcoin users.

[farhanmensah]

nice

[Noa_Amable]

Thanks for posting that.  It is indeed an interesting read.  And kudos to the person who wrote such a comprehensive and informative response (even if it does essentially amount to "maybe, ask your lawyers").

I guess it is not interesting read but also a keynote for newcomers

[znation]

This is a good article, and writers have gone their way to being helpful. Perhaps someone who better understands financial law may shed light on this, but if anyone can be called Bitcoin issuers, then those are operators.