<story><title>US Treasury Guidance on Virtual Currencies (aka Bitcoins)</title><url>http://fincen.gov/statutes_regs/guidance/html/FIN-2013-G001.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>acabal</author><text>I don&apos;t dispute any of that, but in an ideal Bitcoin economy people wouldn&apos;t &lt;i&gt;need&lt;/i&gt; to convert to USD.  Obviously the Bitcoin economy isn&apos;t at that point yet and people need the USD to peg &quot;value&quot; to what a Bitcoin is.  But eventually, if Bitcoin becomes more widely accepted, shouldn&apos;t the economy settle on to what 1BTC is &quot;worth&quot; regardless of what other currencies are doing?</text></item><item><author>thinkcomp</author><text>In other words, if you run a Bitcoin exchange in the United States and you don&apos;t have 47 money transmission licenses, you&apos;d better call your lawyer.&lt;p&gt;If you own Bitcoins, you should prepare for the very real possibility that one day, depending on arbitrary state or USDOJ enforcement actions, you may never be able to convert your Bitcoins back to dollars.&lt;p&gt;For a sense of how backwards our financial regulators are, and how poorly they understand the issues at hand, take a look for yourself:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.facecash.com/legal/brown.html#document27&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://www.facecash.com/legal/brown.html#document27&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Actual quotes: &quot;We don&apos;t regulate technology,&quot; and &quot;We don&apos;t treat every applicant exactly the same.&quot; —Teveia Barnes, Commissioner, California Department of Financial Institutions&lt;p&gt;(This was last week in Sacramento.)&lt;p&gt;Everyone should also familiarize themselves with 18 U.S.C § 1960:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.plainsite.org/laws/index.html?id=14426&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.plainsite.org/laws/index.html?id=14426&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;It&apos;s a federal crime to break your state&apos;s money transmission law that operates independently of, but is likely to be affected by, FinCEN&apos;s federal guidance.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rubyrescue</author><text>It&apos;s the ability to move between USD that allows us to discover the true value of a bitcoin.&lt;p&gt;Quick example - in Argentina currently, the government is desperate to keep foreign currency reserves in USD, so they&apos;ve banned most means of converting ARS to USD. This has created a dual exchange rate where the official value is 5:1 USD, but the &quot;alternative&quot; rate is 8:1 USD. The difficulty of conversion is causing the value of pesos to fall by nearly 40%. The &quot;true&quot; value of the peso is probably somewhere between those two numbers but the market&apos;s ability to discover its true price is being distorted.&lt;p&gt;If a currency as &quot;big&quot; as a member of the G20 ($450 billion GDB) can get massive distortions from closing just some of the easy conversion points, it could destroy bitcoin if the US Government made it difficult to convert into and out of USD.&lt;p&gt;Further, it seems to indicate that BTC would need to be incredibly liquid before converting to USD wouldn&apos;t matter that much.</text></comment>
<story><title>US Treasury Guidance on Virtual Currencies (aka Bitcoins)</title><url>http://fincen.gov/statutes_regs/guidance/html/FIN-2013-G001.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>acabal</author><text>I don&apos;t dispute any of that, but in an ideal Bitcoin economy people wouldn&apos;t &lt;i&gt;need&lt;/i&gt; to convert to USD.  Obviously the Bitcoin economy isn&apos;t at that point yet and people need the USD to peg &quot;value&quot; to what a Bitcoin is.  But eventually, if Bitcoin becomes more widely accepted, shouldn&apos;t the economy settle on to what 1BTC is &quot;worth&quot; regardless of what other currencies are doing?</text></item><item><author>thinkcomp</author><text>In other words, if you run a Bitcoin exchange in the United States and you don&apos;t have 47 money transmission licenses, you&apos;d better call your lawyer.&lt;p&gt;If you own Bitcoins, you should prepare for the very real possibility that one day, depending on arbitrary state or USDOJ enforcement actions, you may never be able to convert your Bitcoins back to dollars.&lt;p&gt;For a sense of how backwards our financial regulators are, and how poorly they understand the issues at hand, take a look for yourself:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.facecash.com/legal/brown.html#document27&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://www.facecash.com/legal/brown.html#document27&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Actual quotes: &quot;We don&apos;t regulate technology,&quot; and &quot;We don&apos;t treat every applicant exactly the same.&quot; —Teveia Barnes, Commissioner, California Department of Financial Institutions&lt;p&gt;(This was last week in Sacramento.)&lt;p&gt;Everyone should also familiarize themselves with 18 U.S.C § 1960:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.plainsite.org/laws/index.html?id=14426&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.plainsite.org/laws/index.html?id=14426&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;It&apos;s a federal crime to break your state&apos;s money transmission law that operates independently of, but is likely to be affected by, FinCEN&apos;s federal guidance.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>betterunix</author><text>&quot;in an ideal Bitcoin economy people wouldn&apos;t need to convert to USD&quot;&lt;p&gt;So how do you think they will pay their taxes?  How do you think businesses will repay their loans?  Do you really think the US government will accept Bitcoin tax payments, or that banks would be stupid enough to issue loans in a deflationary currency that conveys no legal protections?&lt;p&gt;Bitcoin&apos;s only real value in its ability to ultimately be sold for a fiat currency.</text></comment>