On The Legal Attributes And Regulations Of Bitcoin

Since the bitcoin network went online in 2009,bitcoin has experienced boom,slump and rebound.At the present day,the price of bitcoin has risen to an unprecedented high spot,while acceptance of market,price of mining and investment heat determine that the price could be kept above a certain level.From the perspective of the working principle,bitcoin is a dispersed accounting system based on a database which is called blockchain.Due to the application of hash functions,peer to peer ledger and so on,the security of network is improved.An account for bitcoin is composed by a private key,a public key and an address.The seller uses his private key to encode the transaction,which goes to a certain address of the buyer,as the buyer uses a public key to verify the transaction and complete the process.Apart from the both sides,other users of the bitcoin network can also verify the authenticity of the transaction.And if one can arrange all the transactions of the last 10 minutes in a certain format and encode,he can earn the newly generated bitcoins,the process is called mining.The working theory of bitcoin shows the features like high degree of freedom,dependency on data,programatic certainty and portability.However,the risk of a hard fork and difficulty of upgrade determine that it is premature.Speculative tendencies as well as menace of hackers reflect its instablity.The lack of supervision and the waste of power make bitcoin to some extent out of control.These are all shortcomings of bitcoin.In China,a Chinese version of the definition of virtual property is concluded as a fruit of the civil law research,which refers to the asset that is of value and exist as electronic data in the cyber world.According to the definition,virtual property is of virtuality,of value and related to human,as bitcoin is in accordance to the definition,it is a kind of virtual property.There’re four theories about the virtual property’s attribute,to be specific,intellectual property,obligatio,real right and new right.Focusing on bitcoin,since it is generated by program instead of being code itself,it doesn’t meet the requirement of intellectual property.Obligatio couldn’t exist since there isn’t a central authority which operates the system.Bitcoin,on which people could maintain an effective control,while appears to be specific and independent,and has its own value,is in line with the characteristics of real right,still,taking bitcoin’s dependency on decentralized blockchain,possibility to fork and complexity to supervise into consideration,defining bitcoin as a new right instead of traditional rights could possibly lead to a better effect.Japan is a leading country of the application of bitcoin.The bankruptcy of MTGOX triggered the country’s first civil lawsuit on bitcoin,then Japanese government attempted to create supervision on bitcoin by revising its Payment Services Act and Act on Prevention of Transfer of Criminal Proceeds.Although Payment Services Act has the nature of public law,its definition of virtual currencies through configuration,use and extension is at the cutting edge of world research on the topic,and got a positive response among domestic and foreign markets.This is to some extent an answer to the discussion of the country’s civil circle,who has a debate on whether the bitcoin is a real right or a quasi real right,origin from conflicting views on the definition of real right.The quasi real right theory seems to take a upper hand,that echos to the thoughts that bitcoin has some special charasteristics.In China,the legislation of bitcoin is yet to be started,but the People’s Bank of China and other 4 government departments issued a notice on preventing the risk of bitcoin,which denied bitcoin’s usage as a currency,and viewed bitcoin as a virtual good.While the definition of a virtual good is not clear,there are difficulties in comprehending the result of judgment.In order to get rid of the phenomena,a clear definition of virtual currency is needed.With the definition,the clarification of the bitcoin’s belonging is plausible.Meanwhile,some attempts should be made to apply current laws and regulation to relationship about bitcoin,as the relationship between users and bitcoin exchanges,as well as users’ freedom and restriction should be evaluated.