Subject: Message for Mircea Popescu from U.S. SEC
From: "'officeoffice
Date: Sat, February 15, 2014 2:37 am
To: "Waxman, Daphna A." waxman
Perhaps we misunderstand each other. Should you wish to establish your authority on the matter you would have to present all of :
a) the legal basis upon which the SEC is investigating a Bitcoin enterprise, whichever that may be. This would customarily come in the form of an Act of Congress specifically authorising the SEC to review MMORPGs and online activities involving such computer games and their virtual currencies, be they WoW gold, Linden Dollars, EVE Isk, Bitcoin, etc and so forth. Absent that, it may come in the form of a court ruling - definitive and irrevocable or whatever the equivalent of that may be at common law - judging the SEC has such authority. This, of course, is a thornier issue.
b) the authority upon which the SEC is making requests of personally identifying information from me specifically, which would necessarily include solid grounding in both Romanian and EU law.
c) the authority you personally have in the matter. This would customarily come in the form of an order or other such instrument signed by the officer in charge of your department directing you to investigate. Employees of all kinds do indeed often have a phone link in their office, but this is entirely irrelevant in this discussion.
Should you understand you have no authority in the matter but nevertheless wish to pursue some sort of amicable understanding, you will first have to appreciate the difference between legal and illegal requests. In this sense, asking someone to pick up your daughter from school is a legal request (as far as I know of the rapidly deteriorating legal environment in the US, at any rate). Asking them to pick up your daughter and throw her over a cliff however is an illegal request. The difference between these is, broadly speaking, that the party satisfying the first type of request exposes themselves to no liability, whereas the party satisfying the second type of request does expose themselves, perhaps to significant liability, both civil and criminal.
Secondly, yet perhaps as importantly, you will have to appreciate the fact that MPEx has to date, and long before the SEC as much as heard of Bitcoin, pursued with some success if with different means roughly the same agenda, which is to say the exposure of scams and the protection of the general public from scammers of all sorts and types*. In the particular case you brought I must confess I have my own suspicions, which I do not necessarily have either the means to verify or in any way enforce.
I was from the onset and remain for the indefinite future strongly committed to discouraging scams in Bitcoin finance, while nurturing a vibrant, diverse and free marketplace - and this commitment engages MPEx as well as a variety of other Bitcoin institutions and groups. It is on this basis that I would very much welcome a working relationship with your institution, as I believe our respective strengths complement each other superbly. Nevertheless, the commitment to freedom is not merely verbiage, but quite as strong, and on this basis I perceive we may encounter difficulties going forward, especially taking into account the confused legal environment and occasionally misguided political choices coming out of the US.
In the spirit of candor, let me make it perfectly clear that what's being discussed here is nothing else and nothing short of the SEC's ultimate relevancy and importance in the Bitcoin space, and so far I am not particularly impressed. Let us work together to improve upon this shaky basis if at all possible.
All the best,
Mircea Popescu
https://web.archive.org/web/20160309202416/http://trilema.com/2014/interacting-with-fiat-institutions-a-guide/