Can you expand on this? Because the way I'm reading it it sounds like since it "could" be a tool for money laundering the OP shouldn't be doing it. But by that logic a car "could" be used to facilitate a bank robbery and therefore the salesman needs to consider those ethical ramifications.
There's a huge difference between this and a car salesman.
A car salesman goes through all sorts of paperwork and meets with the person they are selling the car too, and they hand the keys over.
This is much more similar to the service where you take a photo of a Key and you get mailed a copy of it for 5$; except it's semi-anonymous with bitcoin.
No, just that the paper trail generated by purchasing a car from a dealership is undesirable for a criminal. This is why conventional financial institutions and services are undesirable for most criminals.
The difference is that government regulators (in the US at least, but presumably in many other countries soon) have stated that they consider bitcoin exchanges to be money transmitters and therefore regulate them in ways that prevent money laundering (http://blogs.reuters.com/financial-regulatory-forum/2014/01/...).
I suspect most lawyers/regulators would consider changing bitcoin into gift cards is legally like transmitting to cash.
Cars are regulated also, for instance to post a license plate that can be used to identify the owner's name and address, in part because they can be used in crimes.
This isn't _just_ an issue of if the seller is being ethical; it's an issue of whether they're following the law.
It's all about due diligence. Selling gift cards for bitcoins isn't illegal. However, you need to be aware that it can be easily exploited for money laundering, and you need to take steps to prevent that. And don't think money laundering is something that just happens in the movies. It's a very real problem, and deserves being attended to.
As for your car example, I'll leave that to the other comments already rebutting it.
Just because someone can do something (technically and legally), it doesn't mean he should do it. I was trying to comment on the course of the discussion here -- there are a lot of comments about regulations and criminal liability but not many about ethical responsibility.
Clearly the most important issue is the factual one... whether there is more than incidental money laundering happening here.
If I had an ad placement business that only placed scammy ads or if I developed software that allowed people to be oppressed, I would also have issues. I would think that enabling criminal behavior is in the same broad category.
As far as cars, there's no issue selling a car. However, if your cars had armor plating and hidden compartment for guns, you have an ethical responsibility to find out if your customers are generally up to no good. If there is still a business to be made from legitimate customers, then maybe there's a way to ensure they're the only ones you do business with.
It's far more akin to a guy who sells guns out of his trunk in a dark alley. Chances are, it's being used for crime, even if there are legitimate uses for it.
One marked advantage to buying a gun for cash in a private sale is that the state won't know that you have it.
While I don't necessarily believe that would lead to acts of malice such as confiscation raids, it has already led to bonehead moves such as publishing over the public network the names and addresses of all registered gun owners in an area.
Also, people buy illegal moonshine when legit liquor stores are available. People buy cigarettes sold in the wrong state or from a tribal reservation. Buying a gun from an alley is a possible choice for someone who would otherwise prefer to bypass taxes, paperwork, and bureaucracy--illegal, of course, but not necessarily a prelude to a different crime.
Actually, it is not a crime in most US states. Person-to-person firearm sales are a wonderful example of a seller choosing to assess the intention of the buyer, and the moral ambiguity that this represents. A person can legally sell firearms out of his trunk in a great many places asking for nothing more than proof of age of the buyer.
This method of sale represents ~40% of all gun sales in the US. It would be safe to assume that the majority of guns purchased with the intention to commit crime are purchased person-to-person. There's a good breakdown of nationwide person-to-person regulations here[1].
> No, because selling guns out of your trunk is a crime more often than not.
So is operating an unlicensed money transmission business -- in the US, this is likely to be both a state and federal crime -- or a licensed money transmission business without adhering to appropriate anti-money-laundering controls.
