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:
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.
Yes my understanding is that it is a VERY long, expensive, and tedious process, that takes years. Even for corporations/banks with a team of people working around the clock to do nothing but get the state licenses. I thought it was a hell of a big mouthful to bite off when you said you were trying.
Also i have read that during the time you are trying to get them, if one state denies the application, you have to inform the other states that they did, and start all over in the states that you did have cleared. A complete pain in the ass.