Defining The Q Coins In Law— Protect In Crime Law Discourse

Started from individual cases, this paper studied the legal nature of virtual currency, a contentious issue in judicial practice. There exists a question in judicial practice: whether virtual currency is personal property or not and what kind of property is it in criminal law, which needs to be studied with scrutiny. This determines the nature of crime and non-crime, as well as the boundaries of this crime and other crime. By summarizing the relevant literature, this paper finds out that there is no well-accepted theory concerning the nature of virtual currency. There has two schools of viewpoints in theory: right of object and right of credit. Virtual currency stands between right of object and right of credit and is hard to distinguish, hence clarifying the boundary between object and credit is the first issue this article required to solve. Historically, the boundary between object and credit went through a process of relative unity to discrete opposition. In Roman times, object of narrow sense and credit are both within the scope of object in broad sense. Object in narrow sense is the object in modern civil law, then known as things corporeal. The credit(to be precise, the right of credit) and other rights(other benefits)both belong to things incorporeal. Things corporeal and things incorporeal are a way of classifying object in broad sense, the difference of them is whether they are existence of objective or idealistic. Thus, along this logic, the first factor to consider in determining the difference between object and credit is objective existence, the one which exists objectively is object. Moreover, it needs to be determined that wither this object is worthy of possessing from the perspective of economic value. There do exists ‘cells’ of object in virtual currency itself, but they are not the hardcore. The nature of virtual currency is the “body” of credit made from the “cells” of object. The virtual currency is supposed to be credit of a kind, is the payment service contract signed by supplier and user.As a kind of credit, the virtual currency can be regarded as the crime target of theft in the theory of our country’s criminal law. Based on two considerations: 1.the esteem to the legal system; 2.the consideration of the unity of legal institution, this paper reckons that this point of view is debatable. In the system of civil law, theft cannot change the civil legal relationship of credit, therefore, the act of theft cannot ‘steal’ credit. This paper mainly discusses criminal law and the system of civil law can be ignored on account of the value of criminal law when discussing criminal conviction. However, if the viewpoints of criminal law and civil law in practice are entirely contrary, there will be contradictory verdicts in juridical practice, that is, the credit is considered lost in criminal judgment and still exists in civil trial, thus, the lost credit and existing credit are the same one, which is an unacceptable conclusion. As a result, the violation act to virtual currency ought be convicted as fraud rather than theft.