Criptomoneta e distacco dalla moneta legale: il caso Bitcoin

The very concept of legal money has been evolving over the last decades, and particularly in the last years. Scriptural money or “bank money” is now widely considered as an equivalent of paper money and coins, and as such a main part of “sovereign money”. In the last years, new species of “money”, free money and virtual money, have increasingly been accepted as a mean of payment. The common characteristic of these currencies is loss of referral to a central issuing authority directly or indirectly controlled by a sovereign State. However, until very recently free and virtual money have been circulating within small sized communities or among limited online operators. This has changed when a new encryption based virtual money, Bitcoin, has been created. The success of Bitcoin have caused economists, sociologists and law scholars to investigate its nature and scope. The paper examines the history and possibile prospects of Bitcoin, taking both its characteristic as technical device and its juridical nature into account. Given the experience of abnormal fluctuations in its value (compared to fiat money and common currencies) the conclusion is that Bitcoin does not seem to be able to be considered as “proper” money, rather than a financial instrument of speculative nature.