regulatory requirements to operate btc-gateway

[prophet10x]

I started this as an issue because it appears to me that to operate this piece of software with live customers would require various permits or licenses.

Since BTC now falls under FinCen at the federal level in the USA, and therefor any money transmitting or money services business has to register in I believe at least 48 states, what are the responsibilities of an operator?

For example in California just to apply for a money transmitter license the cost is $5000, needless to say there is significant paperwork and training involved to be compliant.

There is also the concept of "agent" versus "licensee," in the sense that a convenience store can sell Western Union money-grams and functions as simply an agent.

4 cases I would like to understand, if someone with this knowledge can answer:

1. California based corporation using a gateway to transmit value into the Ripple system only using virtual currencies as defined by FinCen

2. The same as Install instructions #1 but also transmitting real currencies such as Dollars, Euros

3. The same as Install instructions #1 but the corporation is in Sweden (or some other EU country)

4. The same as json request to server #2 but the corporation is in Sweden (or some other EU country)

[Satoshi0x]

I'm not sure how to answer your questions @zynis - but I can offer some further information on the implementation of this gateway.

In April 2013, a developer named emfox from the Devcoin Project (www.devcoin.org) implemented a Devcoin/Ripple Gateway for Alpha Testing. It worked well enough, with one forum member documented having both deposited Devcoin "DVC" after establishing a trust with the issuer you can see at the link below. That user also made an error that our gateway operator was able to witness when establishing trust in the system, and the issuer who controlled the gateway noticed it was because the trust link was established during a routine server reset of the gateway by the issuer. So to complete the transaction supposedly the transaction was able to be fulfilled for 50 DVC (IOUs) on the Ripple network that you can still see under the issuer's "Issued" tab in their balance on this Ripple account page for the gateway: https://web.archive.org/web/20130607230823/http://ripple.d.evco.in/

Some forum background discussion: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=203977.0

AFAIK, Devcoin is a game-currency/community token, mined by POW thru Bitcoin merge mining but with 90% of the block reward going thru a special distribution to developers that we (I'm on the team) distribute using a round-robin CSV file with a list of earned for each round (4000 Devcoin Blocks = 1 round). 10% goes to the Bitcoin miner who has implemented a merge mining patch or is in a pool with one to mine DVC with BTC as they share the same SHA-256d hash algorithm. But never has the blockchain coin traded directly for fiat, or been on the radar of any regulators. If you wanna still try this gateway, I recommend building it with Devcoin (DVC) as we have before. If you're looking for a bounty I'm sure we have one to give. Visit https://devcoin.org and find the community forum from there at bitcointalk.org. Or just reach out here or best yet, why don't you message us via github.com/devcoin/ if interested. Hope all is well. Sorry no one ever came along til me.