Bitcoin Token Maker Suspends Operation After Hearing From Federal Gov't

First time accepted submitter Austrian Anarchy writes with this story via Reason (and based on a report at Wired) about a maker of physical Bitcoin tokens. Quoting from Reason's take: "Mike Caldwell ran a business called Casascius that printed physical tokens with a bitcoin digital key on it, key hidden behind a tamper proof strip. He'd charge $50 worth of bitcoin to print a bitcoin key you sent him via computer on this token. Cool stuff--a good friend of mine found one sitting unnoticed in her tip jar from an event at which she sold her artisan lamps from 2011 and was naturally delighted given the nearly 1000x increase in value of a bitcoin since then. So, you're making something fun, useful, interesting, harmless--naturally the federal government is very concerned and wants to hobble you. 'Just before Thanksgiving, [Caldwell] received a letter from the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FINCEN, the arm of the Treasury Department that dictates how the nation’s anti-money-laundering and financial crime regulations are interpreted. According to FINCEN, Caldwell needs to rethink his business. "They considered my activity to be money transmitting," Caldwell says. And if you want to transmit money, you must first jump through a lot of state and federal regulatory hoops Caldwell hasn't jumped through.'"

Comments

Re:This isn't money transmitting how?

[lgw]

Because you drove there on a road that requires taxes, and have a reasonable amount of saftey, that requires taxes, and the bankers are regulated to not steal from you, which takes taxes.

Always with this straw man. Enough with it - the strawman is dead, bereft of life it rests in peace. It has shuffled off this mortal coil and joined the straw choir invisible!

The amount of taxes needed to fund roads and regulate banks an such is a trivially small and unobjectionable fraction of current taxation. The majority of taxation is money collected from less-politically-favored groups and mailed directly to members of more-politically-favored groups, plus the military.

No one is trying to take your roads. No amount of cuts to road build and regulation could possibly balance the budget in the first place. That's not what the debate is even about.