You're really not. I created Bitfuture two years ago, which did exactly what this site purports to do. Derivabit did the same thing. Writing a platform that does this isn't that hard, getting legal approval is the main hurdle followed by having sufficient money in your market to make it liquid. Derivabit and I both decided to hang it up two years ago when Tera Exchange seemingly made it over the fence and got provisional CFTC approval, but that didn't stop them from being sued and settling [0].
Good luck staying off the radar. I think it's an insurmountable chicken-and-egg problem. If you are going to have enough money to fight your way through the inevitable jurisdictional battles you would have had to start this pre-Mt. Gox to get big enough to survive.
On another note - no one actually wants to hedge their Bitcoin. They are buying it as a highly speculative instrument already, even the players with supposedly large transactional demand for it.
Yeah if I fall under a US orgs' jurisdiction as a EU citizen not conducting business with US citizens as far as I can ascertain, please explain where I'm naive?
This isn't sarcasm, I can't think of a way the SEC would have any say over the exchange instead of it's potential US clients but would like to hear it
> not conducting business with US citizens as far as I can ascertain
If you make a reasonable [and effective] effort to not conduct business with US citizens then they will leave you alone. The mere fact that I can access Deribit undermines their exemption.
But I've seen the SEC charge people with thinner rationale. For example, a eastern european guy in an alleged insider trading ring only traded CFDs on a European CFD exchange. The SEC claimed that he would know that the exchange would have to make corresponding trades and hedging trades in US equities and therefore he is culpable.
If it makes you feel any better, that particular case hasn't reached a verdict yet and was insider trading, so if you feel comfortable dealing with extradition hearings to establish case law in a foreign country or simply not insider trading on US equities, then you'll be fine.
Also, the SEC doesn't charge people that merely gain access to unregistered and noncompliant exchanges. So the "US clients" would never create liability for themselves.
The majority of the SEC's compliance statutes are levied on businesses that offer any product labelled a security. This is a well distinction defined and quite broad and very difficult to play wordgames with. Its just unfortunate that registration is so expensive.
Good luck staying off the radar. I think it's an insurmountable chicken-and-egg problem. If you are going to have enough money to fight your way through the inevitable jurisdictional battles you would have had to start this pre-Mt. Gox to get big enough to survive.
On another note - no one actually wants to hedge their Bitcoin. They are buying it as a highly speculative instrument already, even the players with supposedly large transactional demand for it.
0 - http://www.cftc.gov/PressRoom/PressReleases/pr7240-15