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There exists a cottage industry of individuals acting as money changers for bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. It can be quite lucrative. This is (was?) a gray

There exists a cottage industry of individuals acting as money changers for bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. It can be quite lucrative. This is (was?) a gray market, but judgements like this show the government considers it a black market. What’s interesting to me is that they didn’t simply nail her for buying and selling bitcoin without a money transmitters license. They also used the undercover agent to explicitly say it was drug money, ensuring worse penalties.

dsfyu404ed 8y ago
>What’s interesting to me is that they didn’t simply nail her for buying and selling bitcoin without a money transmitters license. They also used the undercover agent to explicitly say it was drug money, ensuring worse penalties. Creating crime to catch crime is pretty par for the course in federal investigations. The FBI is pretty well known to do it in terrorism cases. The ATF runs their botched illegal gun buying operations that create local crime.
- Nasrudith 8y ago
  I wonder how often the cops get called on the FBI. I know that there was the post 9-11 clownish thing with an FBI informant in a mosque who got banned and reported to the FBI because he was a frothing radical that they wanted absolutely nothing to do with.
yason 8y ago
But since when bitcoin has been "money" as acknowledged to any official sense? As far as I can tell, it hasn't. That was my point: if bitcoin isn't currency or money then it's just trading bitcoins like trading any goods, be it fur, cars, or other supplies. So the case really isn't about bitcoin but someone who took money from illegal sources and washed it clean. And didn't report that income, obviously. That's fine. The interesting part would be to have in prosecution something bitcoin related that doesn't apply to other goods. And in that case it would be interesting to see why the same would not a problem if the parties were trading something else than bitcoin.

dsfyu404ed 8y ago

>What’s interesting to me is that they didn’t simply nail her for buying and selling bitcoin without a money transmitters license. They also used the undercover agent to explicitly say it was drug money, ensuring worse penalties. Creating crime to catch crime is pretty par for the course in federal investigations. The FBI is pretty well known to do it in terrorism cases. The ATF runs their botched illegal gun buying operations that create local crime.

Nasrudith 8y ago
I wonder how often the cops get called on the FBI. I know that there was the post 9-11 clownish thing with an FBI informant in a mosque who got banned and reported to the FBI because he was a frothing radical that they wanted absolutely nothing to do with.

yason 8y ago

But since when bitcoin has been "money" as acknowledged to any official sense? As far as I can tell, it hasn't. That was my point: if bitcoin isn't currency or money then it's just trading bitcoins like trading any goods, be it fur, cars, or other supplies. So the case really isn't about bitcoin but someone who took money from illegal sources and washed it clean. And didn't report that income, obviously. That's fine. The interesting part would be to have in prosecution something bitcoin related that doesn't apply to other goods. And in that case it would be interesting to see why the same would not a problem if the parties were trading something else than bitcoin.