Key facts:
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In the absence of a single definition of “money” the court used the common meaning of the term.
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The ruling only considers Bitcoin as money in the context of the Money Transfer Act.
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A Washington DC court found that Bitcoin is a form of money under the Money Transmitter Law of that district. In this way, the court refused to dismiss the criminal charges against Larry Dean Harmon, former CEO of Dropbit, accused of selling illicit drugs in the darknet, for money laundering and for offering money transfer services without a license.
Chief Court Judge Beryl A. Howell explained that money “commonly means a medium of exchange, method of payment, or deposit of value” and acknowledged that “Bitcoin is these things.” Howell used the common meaning of “money” for lack of a concrete and unambiguous definition of the term in the jurisprudence of the American capital.
Sobre Larry Dean Harmon, CryptoNews released a report after his arrest in February 2020, which details the accusations against him and describes what his operations were like in the darknet.
The importance of this court ruling
In the opinion of Maeve Allsup and Lydia Beyoud, journalists for the specialized business law publication, Bloomberg Law“The failure is likely to have minimal impact on how Bitcoin is treated by the market.” Still, they consider it important because “it aligns the DC rule with the way federal and state authorities treat Bitcoin for anti-money laundering purposes.”
Keep in mind that, as Peter Van Valkenburgh, research director at Coin Center explained, the court ruling only considers Bitcoin to be money in the context of the District of Columbia Money Transmission Act. It cannot necessarily be extrapolated to other contexts.
For Van Valkenburgh, this ruling is “another brick in the wall” that will lead states to define exactly how cryptocurrencies will be treated under their statutes.
Bitcoin is money? The responses of other courts
The legal and judicial debate on whether Bitcoin is money or not is a long-standing one within the history of cryptocurrency and there are numerous rulings and laws on the matter worldwide.
For example, Judge Alison Nathan of Manhattan had sentenced in 2016 that Bitcoin is money, with arguments quite similar to those recently used by Judge Howell. “Bitcoins can be accepted as payment for goods and services (…) therefore, they function as pecuniary resources,” Nathan said on that occasion.
In a similar vein manifested in February this year the Commercial Court of France by recognizing Bitcoin as an intangible, fungible, legal and exchangeable asset, just like fiat money.
Different was the position of the russian court that, under the allegation that cryptocurrencies did not have legal status (situation that changed Recently) denied the victim of a robbery the claim request of about 100 bitcoins that were taken from him by extortion.
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