Collection of legal situations of selling service on the SingularityNET marketplace around the world

Projects
1

Hey everyone,

as I am currently in the process of releasing a service on the SingularityNET marketplace I talked to my tax attorney. I was told that selling a service via SingularityNET in my country (Germany) is not this straight forward as there are two topics to be taken into consideration:

  1. Taxes on the sold services
  2. Money laundering claims

I would like to take the chance to make this project where people around the world can contribute their legal research for countries for 1. and 2. as well as other legal concerns or considerations necessary to sell or buy on the marketplace. Please also explain how you got your information. If you know that something is unregulated - so there are no laws for it - the next step would be to explore what happens in the country if you do unregulated business.

For the second point the scenario is as follows:
A columbian drug lord buys BTC on localbitcoin. Exchanges it for AGI and buys my services for all of it. Then this drug money is converted into tokens my business owns in Europe. I will pay my bills for the creation of the service and transfer the remainder to my bank account. In this process the money was laundered. I could now collude with the columbian to share this money and the dirty money was laundered successfully.

This post is meant to discuss, track and inform potential service providers about pitfalls in their way to become merchants of the future.

pythonEd found a possible solution around the KYC problem:

This could be implemented in SingularityNET to integrate an enable/disable necessity into using the service to include a call and verification of the buyers identity via civics API. In this way the tax issue can be solved as the location and therefore the corresponding location of the user can be also accessed. Via an additional service like https://developer.avalara.com/ the service can then estimate the tax and adjust the price of the service accordingly.
To reduce the confusion of the user the website should probably allow to first check in via the civic API to then fetch the taxes and show the adjusted prices to a user directly.

This will still have the consequences that certain locations will be cheaper for companies to be located in to sell on SingularityNET than others but it will enable people to get around the 1. and also the 2. problem.

For me personally this solution is not perfect as it will reduce the target audience for the service to people that went through the process of creating a civic profile and being able to use it. In a decentralized marketplace I would love to service all possible customers and not just a subset of them. But for now this would solve all the issues.

4 Likes
2

Germany:

  1. unregulated. there is a tax called Mehrwertsteuer which has to be taken for sales to customers from some countries. A workaround would be to always claim it, then you also always have to give it to the state. It is currently 19% so this would make your services 19% more expensive than if you would sell them from somewhere else.

  2. In Europe there is a money laundering law, which requires exchanges that buy and sell cryptocurrencies to make sure that the money is legal. But if the cryptocurrency is not exchanged to fiat the European law does not care about crypto spent. The lawyer I talked to said this would probably be changed in the 5th edition of the money laundering law for Europe.

4 Likes
3

Indeed. Tax is problematical. Tort is universal except in pirate states…

4

The more traction services like SNET gain, the more will governments want their fair share of the pie.

It’s interesting how it will turn out for SNET.

I think, as tens of thousands of services get added in the following couple of years, and the more competition in the platform, the more value will be in the services, hence people with real money will come to buy SNET tokens to benefit from the services.

That’s what I presume is going to happen.

How can you currently transfer SNET crypto currently? For example, if I have 100$ and I want to buy SNET tokens, how can I do that?

Lup.

2 Likes
5

They want to make a direct fiat <-> AGI gateway. But regulation is not so easy and they have to obey global laws.

I found some articles where the regulation around the world is analyzed:
https://knowmytokens.com/2019/02/28/cryptocurrency-and-blockchain-regulations-around-the-world-part-1/

6

Do we pay tax to pirates? Sometimes…

7

I wonder if that’s why certain German goods are crazy expensive. Make a pair of crocs here on a 3D printer, and you’re looking at 20-30 bucks. Import a pair of crocs from Europe, and you’re looking at 170 bucks (factoring in cost of manufacture, respective tax laws, plus the cost of people determined to give their products a 250% mark up on all purchases.)

But import cost is the biggest offender to me.

(It’s one of the reasons, but not the only one, why I probably will just give my source code away for free, and have people built their own robot.)

I mean even if you took away thinking of robots as people ( and I sure do. )

8

Yeah, this greed for money is really bad.
Thank you for giving your time to people for free.

9

Starting with the base code: harm. Harm principle. Tort. Chancery ( contract) law. These are considered global… flowing from these constitutional and posited law. Usually commencing with an Acts interpretation Act… under Acts, regulations that cite codes and standards… there may be branches missed. :slight_smile: