You’re in serious legal jeopardy if you release a virtual currency project into the wild, and not because the currencies themselves are legally murky. Rather, because you are liable for any wrong-doings that might arise from the use of your product or service.

Corporations exist to shield their owners from legal liability. If you pay money to a company and then that company goes bankrupt before giving you your money’s worth, the owners and employees (unless they’re doing criminal activity on purpose) are not personally liable for your loss. On the same principle, if a software developer at Visa makes a mistake and Visa gets hacked, the software developer isn’t personally sued by the shareholders (s/he may be fired, though). The banks, merchants, or consumers impacted might sue Visa, but none of the employees are having their homes repossessed.

Now look at your project. Are you a high school student with a coin-bot that nearly got hacked? Maybe a student developer who made a hobby wallet that was emptied? Or maybe another hobby project stored on a $5/mo shared hosting service? Count your blessings you weren’t sued or prosecuted. If you release something *personally* and your negligence (or bad luck) makes you lose your user’s money, NOTHING is shielding you from them or the law. You are 100% fully legally liable for what happened. It doesn’t matter that it was a bug or that it was “just a hobby.” If somebody put $10k in your online wallet project and you lost it, you’re on the hook.

So far, it looks like cases like these are largely being blamed on the community of users trusting the services. That will eventually change. All it takes is one angry user who lost grandma’s retirement funds to turn a person’s life upside down.

I think it’s great that there is payment innovation happening right now. And I really support developers doing cool side projects. But before publishing projects that move *real money* around on *your personal servers*, think about whether or not it makes sense that you first setup basic legal protections for yourself.