Earlier this year when the Bitcoin became a mainstream name and more and more people were looking into investing and mining the popular cryptocurrency, the US Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) created a guide, telling Americans how cryptocurrencies should be regulated. The guide made it clear for most miners that both companies and individuals mining the popular cryptocurrency would need to register with the US government as a money service business, which was not an ideal situation for the miners that were only mining for themselves and not as a business.
Now it is completely different, as FinCEN has send a letter to the New Jersey based Bitcoin company Atlantic City Bitcoin, clarifying exactly what they meant: “To the extent that a user mines Bitcoin and uses the Bitcoin solely for the user’s own purposes and not for the benefit of another, the user is not an MSB under FinCEN’s regulations, because these activities involve neither “acceptance” nor “transmission” of the convertible virtual currency and are not the transmission of funds.”. The letter from FinCEN also explains exactly which users that will still need to register with them when they are mining Bitcoins.
With the great news from FinCEN, American miners can now breathe a little more easy and not worry about having to file a ton of documents when they are mining cryptocurrencies.