On 10/02/2013 03:58 PM, Florian Effenberger wrote: > as my impression was that the legal details have finally been sorted out sort > of worldwide.
The IRS has declared that taxes must be paid on earnings from Bitcoin. The US court system has declared that Bitcoins are a form of currency, and as such, using that as a medium of exchange won't protect one from criminal prosecution, where the same activity using US Dollars is a criminal activity. The FDIC has declared that Bitcoin exchanges are, under current federal statute and current federal rules and regulation, currency exchanges, and as such, subject to the same legal requirements as other currency exchanges. What some state financial regulators are doing, is trying to rewrite the state's interpretation of existing statutes, rules, and regulations, of both federal and state statutes, so that any business that accepts Bitcoins, is automatically defined as a bank, unless it is currently regulated as a financial institution. The big issue is going to be what the federal government does, when a Bitcoin/Kruger Rand exchange in the United States goes live. It won't matter if it is "in person" exchange, or computer based. (BitCoin/Gold, Bitcoin/Silver, or Bitcoin/Platinum is not as significant as Bitcoin/Kruger Rand, because the latter is legal tender in South Africa, albeit not very often used as such. With gold, silver, and platinum, one can claim that one is simply a retail vendor that only accepts Bitcoins, and since current federal statute does not mandate that only United States coin and currency be accepted, the limitation of acceptable currency to Bitcoin is legal. (In one incident in either East London or PE, an individual put a Kruger Rand into a parking meter, only to receive several tickets, including "failure to pay the parking meter", and "vandalism by making a parking meter not function correctly".)) jonathon -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: [email protected] Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/website/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
