Regulatory Responses to Bitcoin: 2013 Edition

Vitalik Buterin | On 27, Jun 2013. In the past three months, regulatory attention to Bitcoin has increased massively. Before March 2013, the Bitcoin community had had little more to go on than some various government reports, permission to use Bitcoin for political purposes from the New Hampshire Deputy Secretary of State, and a casual remark of approval from the Finnish Central Bank. Now that Bitcoin has become so (relatively) successful, however, governments from all over the world are watching, eager to figure out what they think is the best way to integrate cryptocurrencies into the established legal frameworks. The responses from around the world have been sometimes consistent, and sometimes wildly inconsistent even within the same country.

This shows clearly an important lesson with regard to the nature of governments: although pro-government and anti-government advocates alike often tend to think of governments as monolithic entities which undertake certain strategies and enact policies in order to achieve speficied, whether benevolent or malevolent, goals, in reality government decision making can often be as disparate and chaotic a process as the private market, with hundreds of entities pulling in hundreds of directions tailored to their own specific interests and perspectives. Once one goes beyond a single country to the entire geopolitical scene, the divide becomes even stronger, albeit with certain general patterns. The purpose of this article will be to look at the government response to Bitcoin from all across the world over the past three months and determine the general trends. - Read more here: http://bitcoinmagazine.com/regulatory-responses-to-bitcoin-2013-edition