All financial institutes are snitches whether in the US or not as if they don't comply with US financial disclosures then they will be cut out of the US financial industry. It may also be illegal under US law to tell a customer they are calling the police or submitting a
SAR.
Hopefully the Bitcoinica/Intersango thing will eventually turn into a new full-fledge spot exchange.
Don't hold your hopes for Intersango... Haven't you seen the thread where they locked the bitcoins of a dude who told them he wanted to withdraw the BTC to a silk road address?
Yeah, that was stupid of him
you're joking right lol and the award to the worlds dumbest criminal goes too....
Well the only real hope is to get a network of hand to hand exchanges....
Do you mean hard cash for bitcoins? If so: this would really be nice to have, and if these things start opening up in all places, we will have a secure world-wide cash-transfer system...
On the other hand, there are considerable resources involved in properly operating such an exchange. You'll need quite some physical security in order to cope with possible robbing attempts operating such an exchange would attract. If it weren't so sad, I would laugh my now (the largest BTC exchange accuses us as being criminals one by one, pushing us into becoming victims of real criminals...)
However, I think the whole bitcoin thing became big because of internet possibilities, and it can still use them to grow further. We just need to avoid creating single points of failure, like MtGox strives to be one. What we need is a common API for exchanges, and ideally a free software to operate one. This way, exchanges can be easily interchanged, and after some time more reliable ones will emerge because through the fiercer competition, no one can afford to pull MtGox-like stunts without quickly losing customers. Another thing that would allow to expand on this approach would be some mechanism by which customers and exchanges can prove that certain transactions have happened. This way, we could put up a secure rating system for exchanges by which new users can constantly follow which exchanges have the highest chance of correctly processing transactions.
Finally, I'd like to write some words to all currently operating and future exchange operators.
We cannot neglect that there are some problems involved with different countries' laws. Some may have chosen a bad jurisdiction to operate the exchange on. But if the exchange runs well and it's just some local law that is creating the risk for you to have to piss on your customers, please consider to move the exchange to another country. If you don't have the opportunities or the balls to operate it yourself in another country, I'm sure someone would pay a good price for a well-running exchange.
Another thing is the US financial crime regulation which is striving to have effects on other countries. One might argue that these effects may still be limited by local laws (after all, it's your local politicians protecting your local people's privacy rights who have to fight this out with the US). But in many cases, it may be better to have two separate legal entities, one with US financial business connections and a pure non-US entity. These should still work together rather seamlessly in order to provide a nice user experience, but this approach limits the data where US authorities may even think about requesting access...
