

How the Feds Can Take Even Legally Earned Bitcoins - RougeFemme
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-02-18/how-the-feds-can-take-even-legally-earned-bitcoin

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pmorici
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.

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JumpCrisscross
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_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemo_dat_quod_non_habet#United_States)

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pmorici
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.

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

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alexeisadeski3
How reliable are the anonymizers?

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

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sroerick
How does coinbase operate?

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thinkcomp
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](http://www.dfs.ny.gov/insurance/hearing/vchearing/ehrsam.pdf)

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skelsey
Are you saying that a "former" regulator is capable of "looking the other
way"?

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thinkcomp
Fixed.

To be more specific, three Andreessen companies (Dwolla, Coinbase, and Ripple)
were supposed to be on a panel in San Francisco in October, 2013:

[http://financialwomensf.org/virtual-currencies-are-they-
the-...](http://financialwomensf.org/virtual-currencies-are-they-the-future-
of-payments)

Dwolla pulled out at the last minute, likely due to regulatory pressure from
New York DFS, which had issued subpoenas in August, and less than two weeks
later Dwolla renounced and stopped its involvement with Bitcoin. The moderator
of the panel was none other than William Haraf of Promontory, the former
Commissioner, but he wasn't the only one there. I met one of Promontory's
former partners, who had just resigned to go work for one of the three
companies. (I'm being intentionally vague.)

Robert Venchiarutti, the Deputy Commissioner of Money Transmission for
California under Haraf is the same individual who is still the Deputy
Commissioner of Money Transmission now, and has been for fourteen years.
Connections matter in this world.

