It appears that we will have to delay development work on the DigiByte exchange until we can clear up a few legal issues. First of all, since we are located in the United States we must abide by all FinCEN regulations. This in itself is not very straightforward as there is currently no "clear" rules yet.
FinCEN: http://www.fincen.gov/financial_institutions/
Our biggest challenge is now that a precedent has been set for individual US states to go after crypto exchanges things are going to get much tougher on cryptos: http://krebsonsecurity.com/2014/02/florida-targets-high-dollar-bitcoin-exchangers/
It appears that a "Money Transmitters License" will probably be required in each and every US State. Please note Paypal has applied for licenses in almost every US State: https://www.paypal-media.com/licenses
This is scary because existing companies such as BitPay, Coinbase, Cryptsy could soon find themselves catching scrutiny from individual states. To our knowledge they do not poses licenses in each and every state.
Getting a license in each state can be a very costly en-devour:
Quote
Forty-eight US states regulate money transmitters although the laws vary from one state to the other.[3] Most of the states[4] require a surety bond with widely ranging amounts from as little as $25,000 to over $1 million and maintaining a minimum capital requirement. There is an association of state regulators, the Money Transfer Regulators Association (MTRA)[5] that seeks to create uniformity and common practices and efficient and effective regulation of money transmission industry in the United States of America. The MTRA membership consists of state regulatory authorities in charge of regulating money transmitters and sellers of traveler’s checks, money orders, drafts and other money instruments.
Licenses will also probably be required by foreign countries. If anyone has any additional information on this it would be greatly appreciated. 2014 and the next six months will be a very interesting time for cryptos. It seems everyday now regulators are cracking down.
