That's why we have a bounty for article:
- Nxt and its Decentralized P2P exchanges with mixing services = totally untraceable, anonymous and uncontrolled by any government.
The sooner someone writes it the higher chance to get it published as an answer to this event
From the business insider article quoted above:
FAIELLA, 52, of Cape Coral, Florida, and SHREM, 24, of New York, New York, are each charged with one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering, which carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison, and one count of operating an unlicensed money transmitting business, which carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison. SHREM is also charged with one count of willful failure to file a suspicious activity report, which carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison.
Notice that each of these charges have nothing to do with drug activity even though it was drug activity that got law enforcement focused on these two guys. In the United States, money flow is tightly regulated. Theoretically anybody in the US who owns a single cryptocoin could be charged with the first two legal charges, and anybody that makes a transaction with any cryptocoin with a transaction value greater than $10,000 can be hit with the third charge.
So far cryptocoin activity in the US is pretty much "under the radar" but as it gets bigger in years to come it is going to be more and more tightly regulated. That includes NXT, and innovations to make it truly anonymous will be seen as a threat.
Actually, much of this turns on whether a person or business is a money transmitter and therefor a money service business under the Bank Secrecy Act, which would require registration as such with FinCEN, implementing anti-money laundering procedures and filing suspicious activity reports (among other obligations). FinCEN has issued guidance that merely using crypto currencies to purchase goods or services or to exchange (even using freshly mined coins) does not cause someone to be a money transmitter and therefore rope them into the regulations, but there is still plenty of uncertainty (both with FinCEN and the Bank Secrecy Act and from the multitude of other federal and state regulators, most of whom have not yet said anything on the topic).
The New York Department of Financial Services is holding hearings today and tomorrow, and is contemplating a "Bitlicense" tailored to crypto currency-specific businesses.