Cryptocurrencies: Is Bitcoin the New Type of Real Estate? – Bitcoin Magazine

Below is a direct excerpt from Marty’s Bent Issue #1243: “Is Bitcoin a new form of property in the eyes of the law? Subscribe to the newsletter here.

Preston Byrne makes a strong case that Bitcoin will eventually be labeled as a new type of asset and its understanding could be different in the US and England.

This is a very interesting blog post in which Preston Byrne expands on an idea he’s been publishing since 2018: Bitcoin represents a new type of property and it will eventually be recognized by a court sometime in the future. If you’re looking for something to poke at in this bear market, your Uncle Marty thinks it’s a very stimulating exercise in trying to understand how Bitcoin is and how it probably should be viewed in the eyes of the courts.

As you can see above, Bitcoin is truly unique as a type of asset because it doesn’t actually physically exist in any one place because the ledger is kept in an extremely distributed way and it doesn’t sit. neatly into any definition of property that has yet been established. Furthermore, the nature of control over a UTXO is determined by a private key that can be signed by the person who created it, by someone who gained access to it through dishonest means, or by someone who used a very powerful computer to guess it. . When these factors come together, it’s clear—as Preston points out—that we’re dealing with a special animal.

I’m not really sure how things like taxes will change if and when a court in the US or England sets a precedent that marks Bitcoin as a new type of asset, but I’m inclined to agree that it makes sense for Bitcoin to set a new precedent. Never before has humanity interacted with an asset of this type. Treating it the same as real estate, precious metals, or other types of physical assets never made intuitive sense to me. To be clear, I think this is a positive thing for Bitcoin. The fact that UTXOs don’t really exist in one place, but in a globally distributed ledger, and that you can store private keys in your head has always led me to believe that Bitcoin is simply information – specifically, speech.

If bitcoin is labeled as speech that is not performed in any particular place but everywhere at once, I think that could reduce the ease with which any individual court within a relatively fair legal system in any particular jurisdiction could try to declare bitcoin for taxable within its borders. . Defining this new type of property as something owned by someone but not in a specific location greatly increases plausible deniability, making it much more difficult to enforce local laws on bitcoin owners.