This week members of the Bitcoin Foundation had a series of meetings with regulators and law makers in DC.
On Monday 5 Foundation members, Marco Santori, Patrick Murck, Peter Vessenes, Brian Klein and Jim Harper, met with representatives from a number of US agencies including FinCEN, IRS, FDIC, Federal Reserve, OCC, FBI, DEA, Secret Service, and the Department of Homeland Security.
US authorities have begun to enforce regulation on Bitcoin businesses making some Bitcoin related services illegal or simply not feasible. Regulators have also expressed, and demonstrated, a willingness to prosecute off-shore financial businesses who do not adhere to their policies.
In this situation many Bitcoin businesses are faced with a choice, comply or go underground. But how can you run a business ‘underground’? How do you establish trust when there is no authority to give you a stamp of approval? How do you gain customers when your users know that you can simply disappear with their money?
“I have not faced the prospect of a new year with so much trepidation as when I contemplate what is in store for 2013. Systemic risks abound, which of themselves are not the main story, only milestones on the road to final currency destruction, unless governments somehow regain their senses.”
I think of money as simply a way to measure and store value, particularly the value of people’s time energy and effort. When the way in which you measure value is being manipulated and the method by which you store your productive value is being eroded, the implications for ‘liberty’ are frightening. This distortion of value is disruptive to people’s ability to interact with one another rationally and productively.
This frightful thought has not been lost on GoldMoney’s Alasdair Macleod who today writes “The US, UK, Europe and Japan are all implementing economic policies that must ultimately result in the complete destruction of their currencies; and if you destroy the means of exchange of goods and services, your people will starve.”
BitPay passes 1,000 merchants, more Romeny/Bitcoin drama, the poor ‘opting out’ of banking, Spanish gold and hyperinflation.