Thought some of you might find this article interesting.  Control of the Federal Reserve has been the subject of a lot of controversy in recent years, and I thought this article did a good job of explaining the mechanics of it.

http://mises.org/daily/4171/

The US Dollar is legal tender, which means that you are legally required to accept it for the repayment of debt.  Failure to accept it results in a breach of contract.  This also adds some "intrinsic" value to the US dollar.

Note:  This does mean you are legally required to accept it as payment for goods or services, including credit extended for goods or services.

Look, I understand that you probably feel like a retard for being completely wrong after acting as arrogent as you guys did.

I'm not even going to address your assertion that I have made zero arguments in support of BitCoin being property, as you're clearly just grasping at any argument you can right now.  Go read through the thread, and think next time before you get behind a loudmouth like Sunnankar. 

Also, don't patronize me about my education.  I'm right, you're wrong.  Deal with it.

There are no cases involving bitcoin, so you couldn't use them in a brief. All you could do is make the plethora of arguments that I've made throughout this thread, and wait for the judge to agree with one of them.

First of all, just because it's difficult to prove theft doesn't mean it's not property.  Also, you're getting into difficulty of proof, which is irrelevant to what the law is.  

Second, how can you argue that you don't have property rights in BitCoin and then turn around and say you could recover for them in a civil action?  You're contradicting yourself.  You can't recover a judgment for theft of something you never had any rights to in the first place.

Are you guys really suggesting that there would be no way to recover stolen bitcoins in civil court?    What about fraud, that doesn't involve an illegal use of a computer? 

Do you really think a judge would allow you to defraud someone of $10k in bitcoins and say, "oh sorry, it's not fraud because you didn't take anything of value"??

The WoW gold thing was suggested by a property professor and mentioned by an attorney.  There is no caselaw regarding Blizzard specifically, but the idea behind it is that WoW gold is a contractual right with Blizzard.  This contractual right is alienable, subject to the terms and conditions of your contract with Blizzard.  Contractual rights have long been recognized as property rights, and can usually (not always) be bought and sold unless otherwise agreed to in the contract.  Granted, BitCoin is different from WoW in that there's no central party that you are contracting with.  But the only real difference between contractual rights with Blizzard and BitCoin is that they're different types of intangible asset.  There are many, many different types of intangible assets.

Hopefully everybody has gotten past Sunnankar's rhetoric and realized that his argument is completely moronic.


Yes, it's a crime and intuitively it would seem that you would sue for conversion (a tort) if someone stole them.  Even if - say - I have 1000 BTC and I give you access to my account and you steal them all, it's still a crime and you're liable to me.  I imagine it would probably be classified as some type of bailment situation.

Obviously if you defraud someone out of BTC you're liable to them.  If BTC had no value, none of use would be here right now.  The courts aren't just going to let you defraud someone out of valuable property.

[not legal advice and is in no way intended to be relied upon]

All you need to do is prove your claim by a preponderance of the evidence.  So as long as you can gather enough evidence (emails, messages, etc), you have a case.  Didn't say it was easy, though.

[not legal advice and is in no way intended to be relied upon]

It's immensely more conclusive than anything that's been said here, considering nobody here studies property rights all day long.

In a lot of cases you aren't able to prove a person has received cash either.  Doesn't change much. 

You, sir, are in over your head on this topic.  Allow me to shut you down:

(1) The SEC is an administrative agency.
(2) SEC makes administrative law, which is a very important part of the legal spectrum
(3) The SEC requires certain entities to use GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principals) in their financial reporting
(4) GAAP contains Goodwill reporting requirements
(4.1) Incidentally, FASB is responsible for establishing GAAP.

But keep it up with the creative nicknames.  Really effective logic there.

Of course it would be possible to enforce a judgment.  Judgment liens and jail time make the court system quite coercive. 

I stopped responding because the argument that there are no property rights in bitcoin whatsoever is completely ridiculous and not even worthy of my time.  There are property rights in WoW gold (subject to your contract with Blizzard), why should this be any different?  

If a bitcoin scam makes it to court, no judge in their right mind is going to say, "Oh, sorry, you're screwed out of your $10k investment because there are no property rights in bitcoin."  They're going to attach property rights, and award fair market value, regardless of whether any fiat currency changed hands between the victim and the scammer.  James Madison said that property is "that dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in exclusion of every other individual," (quoting William Blackstone) and that "it embraces every thing to which a man may attach a value and have a right . . . ."

If you can't grasp that concept, this may help:

If I steal 10,000 in euros from you and you sue to recover it, the judgment you're awarded is not the intrinsic value of the paper and ink that it was printed on.  It is the value of the cash in the marketplace.  The same thing applies if someone hacks into your bank account, where most of the money only exists as accounting entries.  Money is an intangible asset with property rights.  Bitcoin is an intangible asset with property rights.  What exactly is so farfetched about this idea???  We have always had property rights in mediums of exchange.  It's basic commerce.

Sunnankar:

I don't know any better way to articulate it than this:  you're an idiot.  The only real "goose chase" I've been on at all was looking into the topic you suggested in the first place.  I've talked to a lot of professors and practicing attorneys in the last week or so, and they all agree that the attachment of property rights to bitcoin is so obvious that it is barely even a legitimate question.  So thanks for absolutely nothing.

I'm also wondering what qualifications you have that make you feel like you know so much, because after talking with extremely competent attorneys and professors, I see that everything you've said in this thread is laughably wrong.  It was a huge waste of time to even respond to you.  Do you even practice law or have any legal training whatsoever?  Even if you do, I would be shocked to learn you did anything more complex than ambulance chasing or divorces.

If you guys still don't agree, that's fine, you can just wait for the first court case involving bitcoin.  I know that doesn't add much to my argument now, but it'll make it that much better when that opinion comes out and I can pull this thread up again.

Legal tender laws don't apply to goods and services.  They mainly apply to pure loans.  There is no legal obligation to accept cash for goods and services, but there is one to accept it as repayment for a loan (as distinguished from sale on credit).  However, given the prevalence and necessity of loans for almost any kind of commercial enterprise, there is definitely a compulsion to use federal reserve notes.

The problem with what you're saying is that you're vastly overestimating how much the mechanics of bitcoin matter in the attachment of property rights.  They only matter to a very small degree.

Also, I know much more about money and property than you do.  I know the actual law, you know little to nothing.  From what I gather, all you know is some crap argument you found on wikipedia about how the fed reserve is unconstitutional blah blah blah.  That libertarian pipe-dream is just that: a pipe-dream.  While you and I might agree that's how it should be, the United States Supreme Court does not, and they are the only ones that matter unless you're talking about a constitutional amendment.

You cited an internet forum as a reference, for god's sake. 

It would appear to me that the trolls that have ascended on this thread care more about post-count than actual facts.  You have no idea what you're talking about, have raised exactly zero legitimate issues, and are in over your head.

I thought it was pretty clever, myself. 

Knox v. Lee, 79 U.S. 457 (1871).  See also 31 USC § 5103.

Yo dog, we heard you like conspiracies, so we put a conspiracy in your conspiracy so you can suspect while you're suspicious.

Out of "there" depth?  Really?  I think you're clearly the one who's out of his element here. 

I'm getting "bent out of shape" (read, resisting) your links because they're poor references, and you're plainly wrong; yet you act all condescending like I you have even the vaguest idea what you're talking about.

If you're going to act condescending, at least be arguably right...  not flat out wrong.