Media Coverage
Source: Daily Journal
Media Coverage
01.02.15
In the past year, federal and state agencies began focusing attention on virtual currencies as the technology continues to show greater potential for mainstream acceptance. Major financial institutions have begun long-term planning to incorporate the currency into their services, and select businesses have started accepting Bitcoin as payment.
Meanwhile, both the U.S. Treasury Department and the Internal Revenue Service have made formal comments about virtual currencies, and New York State has indicated its intention to impose a comprehensive set of regulations that are expected to have implications for the sector as a whole. As the first state-level set of regulations, the New York rules are expected to have a significant impact on virtual currency, and while they’ll likely lend the technology legitimacy in the long term, some of the requirements may even prove more strict than current federal regulations for banks.
"Many comments indicated surprise at the breadth of the regulations and some of them indicated they thought it would be particularly burdensome on the industry,” said Deborah Thoren-Peden, leader of Pillsbury’s Consumer & Retail industry team and co-leader of the Privacy, Data & Information Use team.