Quote from: alpine on April 12, 2012, 08:56 pmmight be a dumb question but just wondering. and if the person buying does something illegal would you be liable?Buying and selling Bitcoins in itself is not illegal and does not amount to money laundering. If however you earn an income as I do from trading in BTC, in theory you should declare this on your tax return and failure to do so would be a felony in the USA and a crime in the UK where I'm from.It's worth saying in the first instance that Bitcoins are designed to be an anomymous system of currency so the point is fairly moot but the answer to your question is no, it wouldn't be illegal. If you buy a drug addict's motorcyle for cash and he then uses that cash to buy a gun to hold up a liquor store, the responsibility would legally fall squarely upon his shoulders, even though you'd done business before.The law is less clear about the kind of business I am in whereby you assist in transforming the proceeds of Bitcoin sales from illegal activities into legitimate money. It's not in itself illegal to make the conversion however knowingly accepting a consideration from the proceeds of crime does place you in a questionable position legally. In practice however this is not an issue as if I choose to mail you 100 dollars in exchange for 25 Bitcoins, it would be near impossible to detect the transaction had taken place. Moreover it would be extremely difficult to prove that those particular Bitcoins a) belonged to you and b) had been earned illegally, as there are many lawful uses for them.In a nutshell, it is illegal to launder money, whether you use Bitcoins or regular cash to do it. However trading in Bitcoin does not in itself mount to money laundering, that's simply one type of crime that can be committed through the Bitcoin network.V.