Jay Addison Technical & Media Advisor of CryptoBiz Magazine at Meckler Media's Inside Bitcoins in Las Vegas Interviewing Andrew Beal, Associate, Crowley Corporate Attorneys. Andrew is a corporate attorney in Los Angeles, California. His practice focuses on venture capital financing and advising virtual currency startups. He represents bitcoin exchanges, large sellers, ATM operators and companies in the consumer services space, dealing specifically with state and federal regulatory issues. Andrew is also an advisor to a number of Bitcoin 2.0 companies, working on issues related to crowd sales, DACs and distributed governance.
Transcript
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foreign we're here live with Andy Beale from Crowley corporate attorneys with so many crowd sales already being done through the online exchanges do you think the upcoming regulation will have much of an impact on consumer protection so I think you're I think you're referring to the to the the regulation coming out of New York and the bit license uh program and I think a lot of that is focused on consumer protection I think a lot of it was motivated by um some of these shortcomings of the early exchanges like Mount Cox and what happened to them um so I think you know the the general focus of financial regulation in general seems to be consumer protection and it's written to address problems that exist in the market it's a direct response so it's totally reactionary to what happens um so yes I think there will be a lot of there are a lot of consumer protection a lot of it's focused on transparency and you know making sure that that business is property properly capitalized properly managed and run and compliant with you know federal and state and state laws so that makes sense do you don't think the large majority would just choose to go the non-regulated route uh crowd sales are interesting because I think that's a that's a sort of a niche segment within the Bitcoin space um I think you have to the extent that a company is finding it is well capitalized and they can afford to do compliance right I think it's to their benefit to do it right because if you are following the law you can be the most outspoken from a marketing and advertising perspective and you will be able to sort of attract the mass markets I think you know you're not going to see some Fly by Night uh Batman guy go out there and get soccer moms start using Bitcoin right it's going to be it's going to be the large established companies right right so do you have any concern the bit license will push Innovation out of the country I think it will push some Innovation out of the country but I think it while it does that it will also bring a lot of very established money into the space so you know right so when you have a lot of you have institutional investors you have banks that are literally looking for clarity so when they get clarity you're going to get you're going to get a lot of people coming in and I think that will that will greatly outweigh what leaves so that makes sense how close to the first version of the Bitcoin license do you think the final version will be um I hope that it's scaled back considerably particularly from a regulating developers and and other people who are creating technology um you know that was sort that was blanketly addressed covered in the in the original proposal and I think you got a lot of pushback specifically on that area too because I think everybody understands that you know developers and entrepreneurs need to be able to push forward as fast as they can that's the only way Bitcoin is going to get where we all want it to get and it's only when you stop and start applying the technology that they built do you need to start imposing rules so but those guys should be able to sort of just they should be able to full Sprint ahead sounds good so I'm going to ask you a tough question here um about Ross Albright trial okay okay so just give us some thoughts on that um you know I one of the interesting things that I one of the interesting legal issues I guess that I find fascinating um was that he is the only you know they they they're part of the part of his coins were seized and and um part of them were not and the portion that weren't were because he was the only person that knew the key and it wasn't written down anywhere it sort of brain wallet right and I find that interesting and one of the one of the interesting questions to me was uh can you force him to disclose that and no so you have the right not to incriminate yourself and so by disclosing the fact that he knows the public key he's sort of incriminating himself by admitting that he has control over that wallet that was Associated right so that's that was to me one of the most fascinating questions um you know I think you know I'm sure they'll strike a sort of plea deal to some extent you know I mean you know you saw it with Charlie and Ross certainly you know from a I think uh from a Syrian seriousness standpoint is probably you know on a different level than Charlie was um but you know there's a lot of smart people working on that case and a lot of people in the Bitcoin Community behind them so there's a lot of people advocating just especially that he just gets a fair yeah a fair process right which I think I mean as an attorney that's you know I like to believe in the system and believe that it works and I think you know to the extent he gets you know a fair Shake I think that's I think that's that's all I can hope for I guess if nothing else we can certainly give him credit for Innovation correct yes well to be honest you know I think you can put a lot of what has happened in the last year a lot of the growth in Bitcoin in the Silk Road now it was it was absolutely a controversial service but it also got a lot of Spotlight and mass media attention so without that we may not be where we are you're right it broke It Wide Open yeah what kind of investment do you think a mining contract would be considered legally um I think it is a it's it's it depends on whether or not you're selling Hardware or if you're just selling Revenue um from the hardware so that's sort of where the whether or not it's a security not a security um question comes up um and a lot of the guys that are doing Cloud money right now are actually selling hardware and they're just not delivering it to you um they are holding it in their data center for you and running it for you but you technically own it even though you may not have any idea how to operate a mining rig um so so what we're going to do is we're going to wrap up here but is there anything that you want to add on and the other thing is add a little bit of contact information if somebody wants to get a hold of you for legal advice in the Bitcoin sector sure so um my name is Andrew Beal you can reach me at Andy crowleystrategy.com and I work with exchanges I work with large Brokers with a coinbase type business model I work with ATM operators just started working with more mining Hardware Cloud mining companies and then you know anybody that's developing technology too if you're just a developer and you're building you know white label software for exchanges you're building some sort of mobile application we do a lot of that too okay great so yeah fantastic here's a real tough question we're going to ask everybody this what do you think the price of Bitcoin is going to be January 1st 2015. I I may be the I don't want to say the naysayer but I may have a different opinion than others and that's I think the price could very well be lower than it is today so I think it could be lower than 300 dollars and I you know a lot of that is because of my my personal belief is that you know it it I don't think it'll actually be used as a currency as much as it's just used as a back-end rail to move other things um Payment Processing type of thing so but I do think you know and I also think that got uh the holding of coins will become more centralized by like service providers and they own a bunch of coins if you own the coins you own the rails so when you can charge people to use use the rails um so when they can offer value-added services on top of that too you know but I also think there's room for others too I think there's room for other coins too um so I think you know if you take the if you take the the market cap of all cryptocurrency together I think it will you know far exceed what we have today but if you just look at Bitcoin specifically um you know it may not be more innovation in the altcoins yeah that yeah you know could be smart contracts and that kind of thing right so yeah so if you take all those market caps together you know huge yeah it could be 100 billion sounds great thank you very much Andy Beale thank you this is Jay Addison from crypto Biz magazine live from meckler media's inside Bitcoins conference in Las Vegas remember to subscribe to cryptobiz magazine at cryptobismag.com follow us on Twitter at crypto is Meg thanks for joining us and learn more at cryptobizmagazine.com