Quote from: runeks on October 22, 2011, 10:54:35 PM

There's something I'm not getting here. If Bank of France doesn't want to cooperate, find another bank! Right? Why spend time trying to force them to cooperate, while wasting your time and the time of your customers in the EU? Just find another bank that offers you (Mt. Gox) the benefit of the doubt; if the bank hasn't been told to handle Bitcoin as a currency, don't do it. There are plenty of banks in the EU, at least some of which - I'd imagine - would be willing to act as an intermediate.

The Banque de France is the regulator - it's decision effectively legally defines MtGox as a money transfer business and prohibits it from operating without a licence. If it's not operating within the law, then it's likely that no bank is obliged to give MtGox an account and they may even be restrained from doing so, not just in France but elsewhere in the EU.

PayPal had to move its operations to Luxemburg and become registered as a bank there in order to overcome EU legal issues, and they'll already been licensed as an electronic money issuer in the UK prior to that. PayPal literally now acts as its own bank in Europe.

It's really not as simple as finding another bank because that wouldn't solve the problem of MtGox needing a license in order to continue offering money transfers under its current business model.

If you look at PayPal, it has different legal status in different places - it's a bank in EU, a licensed deposit-taker in Australia, a licensed money transmitter in the US. In other countries, it's subject to lots of local regulations about whether it can transmit funds across borders, what methods of deposit it can accept, and whether or not it can hold user funds. They have to run their business differently in different countries - just like any international business must - and the Bitcoin exchanges will have to do that too.

Off-shore banks are certainly one option, but they don't necessarily offer any particular advantage over channelling transfers through the existing Hong Kong account.

There is obviously a financial burden which comes with having to operate differently in different locations and it may be that Bitcoin exchanges are more viable if they each stick to servicing one region than if they try to operate in multiple markets which all have different regulatory frameworks.