Virtual Currency In France Have The Same Rights As Puppets

We wrote a lot about the global confrontation, rogue countries, trying to join the crypto market and avoid international sanctions this way. But there is another battle in the world, which lasts more than two hundred years. And it is now applicable to the digital world.

Common law and civil law are finding out which of them is better. Which one is more reliable in protecting people’s interests? Which one is friendlier to business? These questions sounded in the era of Napoleon, and they’ve started to sound in the sphere of crypto economy. Serious arguments between representatives of different systems of law and cultures about the legal status of cryptocurrencies are thriving today. Legal science has not given an exact definition of bitcoin and others yet. Legislators of many countries are also in no hurry to accept normative documents, which legitimize relations in the crypto market. Therefore, countries have to content with precedents.

The French State Council equated cryptocurrency with movable property. Thus, it has become level with such everyday things as cars, furniture, jewelry, and gold. Crypto assets have the same legal status, as domestic animals now. Dogs, for example.

This step has allowed reducing taxes from 45% to 19%, as well as on every deal with movable property. The purchase, sale, and exchange of digital assets are no longer regarded as a process of deriving commercial benefits. At the same time, mining is considered an enterprise and has a 45% profit tax. One cannot say that the process of accepting crypto is running smoothly in France. For example, the senator Natalie GOULET has calledher colleagues to stop cryptocurrency circulation on the territory of the republic at all and to ban the import of cryptomats.  She has particularly noted that digital money can be used to launder money, and cryptomats make it easier for criminals to transfer the crypto to the fiat and vice versa. However, her colleagues have not supported her.

Four months later Russia gave a legal definition to the cryptocurrency. The Ninth Arbitration Court of Appeal accepted the contents of a virtual purse of a defendant-bankrupt as “other property”, to which, according to the European Court of Human Rights, everything refers, that has economic value and can be transferred from one person to another.

There is nothing surprising in such coincidence. Legal systems of Russia and France are very similar. The same legal interpretations of these or those phenomena are usual for these two countries.

States with the common law follow a bit different way. For example, in the USA the legal status of cryptocurrency is interpreted depending on the state, where this or that precedent has been considered. For instance, the District Court of the Eastern District of Texas applied the financial law to the crypto in one of the cases; and the court of the Southern District of New York stated that dictionaries, courts, and statuses confirm - bitcoin is money. The District Court of Miami, on the contrary, stated that crypto is not money, but a financial asset.

At the same time, US Commercial Crime Service (FinCEN) of the US Department of Treasury issued a circular in 2013; it is written there: bitcoin should be considered neither a currency nor a digital asset, but a company, providing financial services. This disagreement in the legal interpretation of the cryptocurrency is peculiar for the USA, where the dispositive law is one of the main values of the country’s legal system. However, the tendency to define the crypto as a financial asset is characteristic for the majority of countries with the common law.

Every year the split in the global legal regulation becomes more and more noticeable. Like in every war, there are rivals and allies, collaborators and “traitors” here. By the way, the latter include Germany, the country with the civil law, which accepted digital coins a private currency.

May we consider this global split of opinions an argument to the point? Probably not. For example, an independent expert, CEO of AirdropAlert.com Morten CHRISTEN from the Netherlands defines digital money the following way.

“Cryptocurrency is first of all storage of value, - he said in an exclusive comment to Bitnewstoday.com – This value may be saved, extracted, and exchanged; it is able to keep purchasing properties over time and maybe predictably useful. In our time, similar storages are stocks, bonds, real estate, gold, and many other things. The cryptocurrency itself may be equal to what value you put in it”.

From these words, it is clear that it is not difficult to give the legal assessment to digital assets. Nevertheless, parliamentarians and courts do not use experts’ opinions, because it is not the law, but the ideology. Cryptocurrency has already become an instrument of political struggle, whether we like it or not. Probably, there will never be a unique definition of digital assets in the world, because it is not the kind of an argument, where the truth will ever be born; but the kind where national ambitions are satisfied and political tasks are solved. And investors will choose the jurisdiction according to the tasks that crypto projects face. For ICO the common law is better (the USA, Australia, Canada, but not Britain!). For privately distributed registries – the civil law.