The_Gloomfrost
You ask important and unfortunately not easily answered questions.
The United States has had almost 100 years of ever-evolving money transmission laws at the State Level which covers safety and soundness and consumer protection and about 45 Years of evolving and ever-encroaching Anti-Money Laundering law at the Federal Level.
Here is a great history of the Federal Regulation.
http://www.nmta.us/site/DocsPosted/JFreis.pdfThe two take-aways from this document are:
1. The AML laws - which were first established in 1970 - are updated in response to new "threats" every couple of years.
2. According the a Supreme Court decision in the United States v. Miller in 1976 - customers do not have Fourth Amendment privacy rights in financial records maintained by a financial institution.
Thus the US has established an ever-growing slate of laws and regulations to provide for almost complete "financial surveillance" in the name of preventing Drug Dealers from benefiting from there ill-gotten gains, income tax evasion and most recently to prevent the financing of terrorists.
A bitcoin Kiosk while a simple and elegant solution to the bitcoin distribution problem flies in the face of this regulation. From a Regulator/Law Enforcement point of view, they just can't have people running around pumping dollars into these machines and creating potentially untraceable virtual currency that will then all be funneled to benefit "Transnational organized cyber-criminals."
While this threat has been somewhat mitigated as Law Enforsement has show that the use of both centralized and decentralize virtual currencies does not prevent you from law enforcement action.
Liberty Reserve Take Down
Silk Road Take Down
Shrem/Fiallia Arrest
The Guys in Florida.
These are not actions against bitcoin per se but actions against the alleged use of virtual currency in violation of existing criminal statues crime.
Bottom line is that there are no easy answers. The state financial regulators have received a number of inquires about bitcoin kiosks in their states and many of them have no idea to rule on them for many of these reasons.
We've seen a kiosk in NM as MN has no money transmission laws. Not sure what the rulings in WA and MA were to allow ATM's in those states. Both one-way and dual-transaction bitcoin Kiosks will be a boon to the industry once there is more clairity in
Washington State has already ruled that virtual currency == value and thus falls under their existing regulations
California seems to be doing the same.
I'd expect something from Texas before the Summer.
And of course NY's "bitlicense" for better or worse will probably be announce in the fall.
Fun times.