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Comment by stephanheijl | Hacker News Reader

I think that when the articles refers to not being universally accepted, it means that Bitcoins do not constitute legal tender. Their value is not guaranteed by any government (which is also one of the reasons the coin is, at least at this point, inherently less stable than most fiat currencies in the world).

The point that was being made, if I am correct, is that you can't convict someone of money laundering if it doesn't involve money, not that the transaction these people hypothetically would've had was OK. If the accused had been trading in, for example, sheep (which also do not constitute money in the United States) the ruling would probably have been the same.

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For the record, legal tender doesn't mean what you seem to think it means: legal tender is that which must be acceptable for payment of a debt. In Scotland, for example, only coins are legal tender. For a regular sale, the merchant is free to accept or reject whatever they choose. But the law on legal tender is designed to prevent bad lenders from keeping debtors on their books by not letting them discharge their debt.

Take a tenant in a secured tenancy, for example. They try to pay their rent, but the landlord won't accept payment, because they want an excuse to evict them (non-payment of rent being one of the few acceptable reasons for evicting a secured tenant). But if (being in Scotland) the tenant dumps a bag of coins on the counter, they are obliged to accept that to settle the debt.

Legal tender has another quirk: in the UK, coins are only legal tender up to a certain amount. If you try to pay your rent of £500 using only pennies, your landlord can refuse to accept it.

http://www.royalmint.com/aboutus/policies-and-guidelines/leg...

For example, you can only use up to £10 worth of 50p pieces. Any more and the coin is no longer legal tender. The only coins that have no limits are £1 and £2.

The much rarer £5+ coins are even more bizarre. According to the Royal Mint, they are legal tender but at the same time, shops and banks do not have to accept them!

Scotland has different laws around legal tender, and no notes are legal tender here.

And while you might expect shops and banks to accept any coins and notes in general circulation, they aren't obliged to at all (except the issuing bank for any notes you might have, which must exchange notes they have issued -- although since we moved off the gold standard, they'll just give you another note of the same denomination).

The URL I gave covers the law for Scotland...

> The much rarer £5+ coins are even more bizarre. According to the Royal Mint, they are legal tender but at the same time, shops and banks do not have to accept them!

Funny story. I've actually had US$2 bills declined because the cashier never knew they existed.

In fact, the US used to print $3 bills as well, but those fell out of favor and eventually removed because of disuse.

> the US used to print $3 bills as well

The federal government never did, but some states and private banks printed $3 bills back when they had their own currencies.

I don't think there's any money laundering going on in this case (at least based on the info from the article), that said though - Liberty Reserve founders were charged with money laundering even though their "liberty reserve dollars" were completely virtual and, unlike btc, not used outside of their own private ecosystem.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_Reserve

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