It's not only because the regulations are unclear, it's also because greedy idiots are playing their games. We have a new wannabe crybaby company in Germany and they are trying to shut down competitors Bitcoin ATMs by sending their lawyers to the regulators (BaFin) to shut them down and place their own ones in the future instead.
Are the new regulations coming in 2020 going to affect the operation of Bitcoin ATMs in Germany?
Yes, everyone who distributes crypto against Fiat / Fiat against crypto will need a license from BaFin. But I'm not a lawyer if there are some exceptions.
You guys might want to contact all cryptocurrency-related or friendly news/blogs channels, and let the story out to ostracize such nasty people. Are they bankrolling the ATMs and the bank on their own, or do they have investors?
Spot9 (the new company) hasn't even a working product right now. They want to launch their zero-tolerance KYC-ATMs somewhere in the future but are already "cleaning" the market for their entrance.
They are planning to fund their operations via shitcoin offering for their ecosystem (a Bitcoin bank and Bitcoin ATMs):
https://www.spot9.com/en/The media released some articles about it like
here but I guess Spot9 will use a part of their fundraising to place own articles supporting Spot9's point of view. The article is even giving a statement that existing ATMs are legal right now:
While KYC still isn’t a legal requirement on crypto ATMs, many companies that have crypto ATMs with KYC are pushing to make this mandatory – such as Spot9.
I think Spot9 is knowing very well that the customers will prefer ATMs without KYC and their product has no chance in a free market. So they are trying that way to compete by removing all competitors which they do not want...
But I think it's a bit off-topic here, I will open a new thread some time later. It will take some time until their shitcoin offering goes live. And if we have a look how successful such shitcoin offerings are right now, they will have a bigger problem than removing competitors: getting their own product up and running...
I was just going to post regarding the Burger king delivery service... I've tried to make an order and it does use BitPay which make absolutely no sense at all.
I don't think that the ban is real for Germany ...I've tried to access BitPay.com using a Moroccan IP address (banned country) and this message was being returned from Cloudflare:
And then I changed it to German I.P, and I managed to access the site perfectly fine. Any thoughts?
Exactly, next year (2020) all crypto-to-fiat services (like exchanges or payment services etc.) will need to get an official license from BaFin (German SEC) to operate in a legal way.
Are you 100% sure? Because if you check out the Press board with the news about Burger King accepting Bitcoin in Germany, they don't accept bitcoins directly but the delivery company (lieferando.de) accepts Bitcoin, and it is a German company (a subsidiary of another German entity actualyl) yourdelivery.gmbh
https://www.lieferando.de/kundenservice-konsument-betreff-bezahlen?fid=831#cs_item_831Right now it's still legal without license, it's only mandatory from next year on (2020). BitPay shut down in advance, theoretically their operations would be legal until 12/2019 without license.