Electronic money system development in European Union by Daniel Wilusz is interesting:
Directive 2009/110/EC introduces quite liberal definition of electronic money which states that, electronic money means electronically, including magnetically, stored monetary value as represented by a claim on the issuer which is issued on receipt of funds for the purpose of making payment transactions as defined in point 5 of Article 4 of Directive 2007/64/EC, and which is accepted by a natural or legal person other than the electronic money issuer.
And than:
"From the technical point of view, this definition broadened the scope of electronic money systems architectures. Directive 2009/110/EC defines electronic money in the way that enables both token-based and account-based systems to operate, as it limits only the way the electronic money is stored (electronically or magnetically), without influencing the place of storage. In particular, European Authorities declare in the preamble of Directive 2009/110/EC that, the definition of electronic money should cover electronic money whether it is held on a payment device in the electronic money holders possession or stored remotely at a server and managed by the electronic money holder through a specific account for electronic money.
source:
http://www.kti.ue.poznan.pl/sites/default/files/Wilusz_Legal_determinants_of_electronic_money_systems_development.pdfAhh, but the thing about cryptocoins is... there are no coins. All the terms like "wallet", "send", receive", etc. they're all a bit misleading because nothing is actually stored or transferred, when you "receive" coins what you actually receiving is the ability to modify part of a distributed ledger using your private key.
Ok, pedantic argument but it does highlight the kind of problems caused in trying to build an economic system using a language originally developed for telling other monkies where to find the best fruit, that directive probably cost hundreds of extremely expensive hours to formulate and it's full of holes. What about machine to machine transactions, they don't count as payments? Common sense would suggest it would be up to the courts to establish how it's applied in areas it doesn't clearly cover but they seem just as confused by it all, calling crypto a commodity one day, a token the next, give them a few years and they'll probably come to the conclusion that crypto is a platypus.
How hard can it be? "if (balance > 0)... ", so simple yet put 100 lawyers on it for 100 years and they still wouldn't have an infallible definition.
EDIT: Wow, both the blue
and the red pill, we is goin' quantum!!