Bitcoiners in Wonderland: Lessons From the Cheshire Cat

• Autores: Matteo Solinas
• Localización: Lloyd's maritime and commercial law quarterly, ISSN 0306-2945, Nº. 3, 2019, págs. 433-456
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • This article examines the legal boundaries of bitcoins, seeking to understand them at a time of rapid change. In doing so, it asks whether bitcoins can be conceived as property under English law, and how they can be alienated. It also highlights the distance between the conventional perception of ownership rights over bitcoins and the developments in market practice. The reality today is that bitcoins are held and traded on exchanges on terms inconsistent with the original techno-utopian belief that trust in a central authority could be replaced with trust in computer code and mathematics. After the euphoria of the past ten years, changes in market practice raise concerns (also) on the possibility that purchasers of bitcoins are not well informed on the inherent legal risks in the investment and exposed to learn the lesson of how financial bubbles operate the hard way.