This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, April 12, 2016, and Caleb Brown.

Bit License was a first of its kind of cryptocurrency regulation framework in New York State.

Dana Syracuse, his former Associate General Counsel in the New York Department of Financial Services,

which helped develop that license.

Peter Van Volkenberg is director of research at Coin Center.

We spoke about bit license during Cato's conference on

cryptocurrencies held today.

Who brought Bitcoin to the attention of state and federal regulators?

Was it people who were

who were operating within Bitcoin and wanted to know when the feds or states might

clamp down on them or was it the federal government saying we need to, or the governments

saying we need to do something here?

So in New York it was in the summer of 2013, New York State Department of Financial Services is the regulator of money transmitters

in that state and we started receiving letters from existing money transmitters saying

there's this technology out there, there's this thing called Bitcoin,

is it money, is it regulated under existing money transmission statutes, what should we do?

And at the same time, we started talking with other virtual currency

companies. And that was kind of the launch of the inquiry for New York, which led to two-day hearings, led to numerous

meetings with industry, with academics, with various stakeholders, with investors in the space, and two different drafts of the bit license,

which was the first virtual currency regulation to go live.

I think we received something like 3,700 comments of which I read them all with the group that I was with we read them all with, the group that I was with, we read them all.

And I think that that was a superb process.

...