Ahh, 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!!
TPTB will have hard time defining and / or defeating crypto-currencies.
The legislation defines them as personal use assets, so crypto transactions are akin to barter arrangements. For the tax purposes, virtual currency is treated as property for U.S. Federal Tax Purposes. In Germany, Bitcoin (and other cryptos) is "private money" which can be used in "multilateral clearing circles.
Nick Szabo used Chaumian protocol to coin a "digital bearer certificate" term, incorporating digital cash and distributed capabilities (secure distributed object references). It was in 1997.
source:
http://szabo.best.vwh.net/bearer_contracts.html