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After Mt. Gox and Liberty Reserve recent cases (and especially because everyone knows that governments aren’t too happy with Bitcoin’s success), it could even seem that the North-American federal authorities were trying to defeat digital currency. However, the director of the USA Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network denies that possibility.
According to Jennifer Shasky Calvery, the recent accusations made against Liberty Reserve are just part of an isolated case, not a crusade against all non-fiat currencies. What happened with Liberty Reserve was an action “against one financial institution and one type of financial service. A criminal case against a particular violator“, said Calvery.
The director of FinCEN remembered that, in March, the institution issued a warning to companies handling large volumes of digital currencies, which said that they must adhere to the anti-money laundering standards like everybody else. It was just a “technical guidance” to existing MSB regulations, so they could keep up with new technologies.
Jennifer Shasky Calvery claims that only the companies and services that don’t operate “with transparency and integrity within the bounds of the law” are “going to have to account for that”. Well, let’s hope that Liberty Reserve can serve as an example.
