Everyone seems to have learnt their lessons from New York State’s BitLicense experience. Bitcoin community and few rights groups in the State of California have been protesting against the government’s move to introduce digital currency regulations in the state. There are multiple groups involved in these protests, these groups are now polarized into two different sections with few conflicting views towards the proposed digital currency regulation.
While the digital currency regulations are still being drafted by the State of California, the opposition towards introduction of such regulations is also growing. The opposing parties includes Coin Center – the digital currency advocacy group, Electronic Frontier Foundation – An internet rights group and Copia Institute, which is a digital innovation think tank.
Each organization has its own views regarding digital currency regulations. Copia Institute believes that the introduction of regulations at this point will affect the whole digital currency industry. The digital currency sector is still in nascent stages and these regulations will hinder innovation at a critical time when innovators are supposed to be working without bounds to create new products. The views of Copia Institute and Electronic Frontier Foundation is not completely shared by Coin Center.
The three organization share the same view about most of the things, except for Coin Center’s disagreement towards the demands of Electronic Frontier Foundation and Copia Institute to not apply money transmission laws to bitcoin. Coin Center believes that the regulations should be introduced but kept liberal and at the same time instead of resisting any form of regulation.
Peter Van Valkenburgh, the Director of Research at Coin Center has been quoted by one of the crypto-news publication saying that the Electronic Frontier Foundation has so far done some amazing work with free speech, but they have never worked in financial law and in this case, they seem to have missed the bigger picture here.
There is still lot of time left for these regulations to be finalized and implemented. Until then, bitcoin companies can continue with what they have been doing so far.