[jheriko]

if you do something that is legally ambiguous and you get penalised for it then it is your own fault.

this is one reason why i am reluctant to buy any bitcoins or cryptocurrency in general - esp given the strong background of money laundering.

its a shame. i do think the future of currency lies in bitcoin or similar... its just not there yet.

sure if everyone ends up using it the legality will need resolving sooner, but to a very good approximation nobody uses it at the moment (!)

i base this on the data that there are a great deal fewer bitcoin addresses in use atm than enough to assign one of them to each out of 0.1% of the world population - given that many people use multiple addresses i don't think its unreasonable to consider it very close to non-existent in that naive sense... penalising all of the people currently involved is not out of the question yet... not by a very long way imo.

(source: http://blockchain.info/charts/n-unique-addresses?timespan=30...)