Located mere miles of the coast of Scotland, the self-governing British Crown Dependency Isle of Man has long served as a haven for those wanting to escape regulatory forces of the U.K. With virtually no taxes, the country has also attracted several companies who make their profit in various forms of arbitrage, including a healthy…
Last week, the Conference of State Bank Supervisors (CSBS) hosted its Emerging Payments Task Force at a meeting in Chicago. The task force met with representatives from SecondMarket, CoinX, Xapo and BitPay to discuss the the current state of bitcoin regulation and its impact on the quickly growing virtual currency industry. Speaking with the CSBS…
Thus far, the Federal Reserve has had a hands-off approach to bitcoin, regularly citing its lack of jurisdiction over currency-like commodities and non-state backed currencies. But that doesn’t mean the Fed isn’t paying attention to bitcoin’s rapidly growing impact on domestic and global finance. At a meeting of the Fed’s Federal Advisory Council (FAC), the…
Earlier today, China’s five largest bitcoin exchanges released a joint statement on the Twitter-like social-networking site Weibo. The statement acts as both a mea culpa for the ongoing problems in with bitcoin in China, as well as the first public announcement of a move towards self-regulation for the exchanges. The five participating exchanges are OKCoin,…
Is the People’s Bank of China too big to create appropriate bitcoin regulation? According to a guest post on BitcoinBlog.de, that may be the case. Chinese IT entrepreneur Zhang Weiwu has a decade-long history of working with authorities in the country, and believes that bitcoin’s recent woes with the Chinese central bank is less a…
Speaking at the Bloomberg Breakfast event today, US Department of the Treasury Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence David S Cohen answered many questions about the evolution of policies and law enforcement tactics related to virtual currencies. Cohen focused largely on efforts to combat illicit uses of cryptocurrency, but also hinted that long term…
In a report earlier this week by Reuters, Mark Wetjen, the acting chairman of the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CTFC), was quoted as saying that his department is “looking into” regulation of bitcoin and other virtual currencies. “It’s been initiated, there’s been an internal discussion at the staff level,” Wetjen said. The CFTC regulates…
As governments across the globe race to develop laws and policies for handling virtual currencies like bitcoin, one of the biggest problems they face is simply knowing what general category cryptocurrency falls under. They’re clearly not legal tender, or even currency, even though in practice virtual currencies act like money. In a new report from…
In a new statement from New York Superintendent of Financial Services, Benjamin M. Lawsky, the state is now officially accepting applications for digital currency exchanges. The new exchanges will be regulated under still-forming rules that Lawsky plans to have in place by this summer. Today’s public order is the next phase in NYDFS’s public inquiry…
The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) issued a “Fraud and Scam” alert about Bitcoin today, noting the “very real abuses and criminal activity associated with it.” Such a claim is interesting coming from FINRA, the privately owned, non-governmental organization charged with the self-regulation of member brokerage firms and exchange markets. FINRA has no authority over…