[H-GEN] Legal status of bitcoins in Australia

Russell Stuart russell-humbug at stuart.id.au
Mon Mar 24 01:42:11 EDT 2014


Rusty Russell has a recent blog post about the legal standing of
bitcoins in Australia [0].  It appears he _paid_ thousands of dollars
for a legal opinion [1], and then made it available for free.

The TL;DR version it is consists of opinions on how various regulatory
agencies view bitcoin:

ATO:  We don't care what you trade, we don't care if it is legal or not,
      we just want our cut.

Collateral:
      The Personal Properties Securities Act 2009 (Cth) says bitcoin can
      be used as collateral(!)  Well maybe not that surprising.  If
      "good will" can be treated as property, there is no reason
      Bitcoins shouldn't be.  So you will go to jail for stealing it.

And the rest:
      The answers from the rest of the agencies could be summed up as
      "do I regulate a bit what?" Eg, from the opinion: "The Anti-Money
      Laundering and counter-Terrorism Financing Act 2006 (Cth) (AML/CTF
      Act), ... specifically contemplates e-currencies, but these are
      defined to only come within the scope of the Act where backed
      directly or indirectly by precious metal or bullion, which is not
      the case for Bitcoin. Accordingly, a large number of the
      obligations under the AML/CTF Act will not apply to Bitcoin."



[0] http://rusty.ozlabs.org/?p=384

[1] http://www.kellyco.com.au/library/Alert-BitcoinBafflesRegulators-March2014.pdf



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