California governor signs bill to bring Bitcoin and other currency into fold | Hacker News Reader

California governor signs bill to bring Bitcoin and other currency into fold

reuters.com

95 pointstilt20 comments

This bill is largely irrelevant and pro forma. There was no enforcement of the underlying statute it repeals anyway.

The bigger development is what's going on with AB 2209, also sponsored by Dickinson--the only legislator I've ever seen censor public comments by refusing to accept ones he doesn't like. Here's AB 2209:

http://leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/postquery?bill_number=ab_2209&...

Rather than repeal the Money Transmission Act (which also governs Bitcoin), they're adding a loophole such that money transmission is exempted from the definition of "money transmission."

Here's some Public Records Act documents from the DBO, which enforces the MTA:

https://archive.org/details/california-dbo-emails

They call New York regulators "fools" for "rushing" to regulate Bitcoin.

The upshot is that every Bitcoin startup in California is still and will still be breaking multiple laws, possibly including the MTA (which AB 129 has no effect on) and Y Combinator and other VCs are just as liable legally as any of the founders of those startups via federal law.

Do you have some kind of alert system that allows you to comment on every single Bitcoin-related submission here? I've rarely seen you miss an opportunity to point this out.

I noticed that you didn't mention your personal involvement with several of these companies this time around.

Rarely?

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=bitcoin#!/story/sort_by_date/0/bit...

I don't comment on the vast majority of Bitcoin stories. In fact, I haven't commented on much of anything except what's going on with the Aaron Swartz documentary in the past two weeks.

I don't have an alert system. I follow banking/legal issues closely. In this case the media is making it sound like California just "legalized" Bitcoin. That's a completely misleading angle. I don't see anyone else correcting it; most of those who know better have a financial incentive not to.

>>This bill is largely irrelevant and pro forma. There was no enforcement of the underlying statute it repeals anyway.

This is true until it isn't[1].

1. http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/560564-the-essence-of-fascis...

>>The upshot is that every Bitcoin startup in California is still and will still be breaking multiple laws, possibly including the MTA (which AB 129 has no effect on) and Y Combinator and other VCs are just as liable legally as any of the founders of those startups via federal law.

And this is exactly why I'm glad there are people who use legal reforms to chip away at situations like this. Companies & people that are operating in a form that's technically illegal but nobody enforced the law on them. One day, Coinbase or whatever starts getting really big then some back-room deal(extortion) happens where someone says "Look, you either play ball with me or I'll start reminding powerful authority figures about Law ABC of section 123, on appendix XYZ passed 7 years ago as an amendment to a completely unrelated bill nobody was paying attention to that would shutdown your whole operation."

I'd also like to see some kind of reform for the ridiculous situation created by IRS declaring bitcoin as property without any clear process of accounting and reporting it on your taxes. Look at this: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Tax_compliance ...what am I suppose to do here? What this really cause is the creation of 2 kinds of people. Those overwhelmed/intimidated by IRS and just quit bitcoin altogether, then those who choose to just ignore it and thus are now breaking a law that definitely won't be uniformly enforced. Forget about the counter-argument "Well, they choose to break the law so they need to accept the consequences". Those who are thinking of this I invite to read the following: http://www.marco.org/2012/02/25/right-vs-pragmatic . It's nonsensical to expect everyone involved in buying/selling bitcoin to suddenly be able to handle the tax implications in this fashion. There was a time I was able to just create a bitcoin QRcode coupon and give it to someone without a second thought. Now it's all mixed up with property tax or something; I dunno.... nobody does. At least that Wiki entry isn't 100% sure and nobody wants to be on the receiving end of IRS's wrath.

> Law ABC of section 123, on appendix XYZ passed 7 years ago as an amendment to a completely unrelated bill nobody was paying attention to

Surely you've read all 150,000 section of the California statutes, 50,000 sections of the federal statutes, 30,000 sections of the California regulations, and 30,000 of the federal regulations. I mean, its not as if the government is purposely not publishing the law in an accessible manner. The government spends billions of dollars to send frogs into space, so surely the law must be so easy to find and read that you can download it in a standardized, machine-readable format from a multitude of sources, for free (as in freedom and as in beer)..

Is it fair to say that the laws are deliberately not published in an accessible manner? It seems more plausible that the sheer volume of the laws and amendments mean that it's hard to publish them in an accessible way.

If only we could adopt a git workflow. ;)

Its often available in a standardized, machine-readable format, but inaccessible nonetheless. E.g., California's laws have been available in XML since the 1990s or something, but they weren't accessible until 2009 or so.[1] Inaccessibility is obviously not a technical problem.

[1] http://maplight.org/pr_lawsuit

You're supposed to treat Bitcoin just like all other foreign currency is treated for income tax purposes: as property, because it is not currency for U.S. tax purposes. It's not rocket science; the basic principles are generally the same in almost all Western countries and have been for decades.

If Bitcoin is folded with other currencies then Bitcoin can have a say in the currency value unlike the govts having a say of their individual currencies.

And that my friends is madness as one institution will have a say over the buying value of all the people in the world.

I understand the individual words, but I have no idea what you're trying to say.

This isn't a bill about just Bitcoin, why is it singled-out in the title? Oh, because all the Bitcoin maniacs will keep echoing like there's no tomorrow!

It's my understanding that this bill was largely driven by Bitcoin supporters even though it is written in a general sense.

Not really. I've read the draft a few months ago.

The only people I see getting violently insane over Bitcoin are people who are afraid of it and unable to resolve their cognitive dissonance over it. I get you don't like it - but that doesn't mean you have a right to make blaming statements over it. I for one, am not a maniac.

BTW, contrary to your statement saying the bill isn't just about Bitcoin, here's the link to the brief: http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/pub/13-14/bill/asm/ab_0101-0150/ab.... Bitcoin is mentioned 23 times - a good reason to single it out if there ever was one.

I don't mind the flies... unless they start bugging me with their annoying buzz.

So, when you downvote me, the price of Bitcoin automagically will go up?

Does that frighten you?

But why? I do have more bitcoins than most of you here, but the world doesn't spin around Bitcoin. The bigger the hype, the worse the crash.

The bigger the hype, the worse the crash, the cheaper the Bitcoins at the bottom of the crash :) I've got used to this since the great crash of 2011.

Pump and dumps (and dump and pumps, respectively) can happen only till there are new inexperienced idiots joining the bubble. And, fortunately, just like the number of smart people, the number of idiots with money is a finite number.

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