Re: Bitcoin in France: first legal decision directly related to Bitcoin?

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Thanks for the explanation! I think I understand it better now. It's basically because Mt. Gox stores its user's USD, EUR etc. and needs to transfer these funds to Mt. Gox in Japan that it needs this license.

So wouldn't the solution to this be to not transfer the money between countries? Ie. have a different exchange in each country and then an exchange would only need to store (and not transfer) the users' funds.
A group of people in my country of residence (Denmark) is trying to set up an local exchange (Copenhagen Bitcoin Exchange (CopBE)) which would (unless they charge fees for deposits) be free for me to deposit money to (since my bank takes no fees for domestic bank transfers). They've written that they have applied for a permit that gives them "limited permission to store electronic currency". So it seems they don't have to become registered as a bank because they're only storing currency, and not transferring it between countries.

As far as I can figure out, an option for Mt. Gox could be that they buy this exchange (CopBE), make it a part of Mt. Gox and then they'd have Denmark covered. Repeat for each country in the world.

I don't think transferring the funds to Japan specifically is the issue. It seems more to be that it receives, holds, and transmits money belonging to others at all. Many countries require licences if you're doing that even if all of the transactions are purely domestic.

OK. It will be interesting to see if the above mentioned exchange (Copenhagen Bitcoin Exchange) gets its permit. In Denmark there are two types of licenses to apply for when handling electronic currency, the "limited permission to handle electronic currency" (that CopBE is applying for) and the full "electronic bank permit". It would be useful if this "limited permission" is easier to acquire than a full permission. I imagine that Denmark could be different from other EU countries with regards to this as we don't use the Euro, but our own Danish Krone (Crown) currency. Anyway, they applied for the license in the beginning of October and the answer should come no later than 60 days after, so in early December we might know.