How the Feds Can Take Even Legally Earned Bitcoins

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-02-18/how-the-feds-can-take-even-legally-earned-bitcoin

by RougeFemme • 12 years ago

17 19 12 years ago

businessweek.com

thinkcomp6• 12 years ago

In the United States, there is not a single legal Bitcoin exchange. That's all you need to know.

sroerick• 12 years ago

How does coinbase operate?

aqme28• 12 years ago

It operates on Bitstamp's exchange to buy/sell when orders can't be satisfied with existing assets.

thinkcomp6• 12 years ago

It relies on Andreessen Horowitz's connections to former regulators, such as William Haraf, the former Commissioner of the California Department of Financial Institutions, now employed by Promontory Financial Group, to convince the DFI (now DBO) look the other way while Silicon Valley Bank pretends that what it's doing doesn't pose any legal problems.

Coinbase knows exactly what's going on with the money transmission laws it chooses to ignore. See:

http://www.dfs.ny.gov/insurance/hearing/vchearing/ehrsam.pdf

rdl• 12 years ago

Coinbase isn't really an exchange in the same way mtgox/etc. are. It's a hosted wallet and a USD/BTC market maker.

dublinclontarf• 12 years ago

Coinbase are a broker.

pmorici5• 12 years ago

I doubt that. That's a pretty extraordinary claim care to back it up with some examples or facts.

thinkcomp6• 12 years ago

Legal compliance requires money transmission licenses in 47 states and registration with FinCEN pursuant to 18 U.S.C. § 1960. No exchange fulfills all of these criteria; most haven't even bothered to try.

alexeisadeski3• 12 years ago

How reliable are the anonymizers?

pmorici5• 12 years ago

What is the point of this article? If he is saying that anything that can be shown to have passed through the hands of a criminal in the past could be seized then absolutely nothing is safe even cash and especially any electronic transaction. That this is the case is sad but it's not unique to Bitcoin.

JumpCrisscross• 12 years ago

Legal tender and negotiable instruments, e.g. cheques, are exempt from the nemo dat rule [1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemo_dat_quod_non_habet#United_...

pmorici5• 12 years ago

That Wikipedia article seems to be talking about goods that were stolen and then resold but the Bloomberg piece is talking about the government seizing things which they think were involved in a illegal transaction w/o claim that anything was stolen just that one of the goods exchanged might have been illegal in the eyes of the law.

agorabinary• 12 years ago

Why repost? This was submitted and discussed several days ago.

How the Feds Can Take Even Legally Earned Bitcoins

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