Bitcoin in the Polish law

Abstract

The current digital and technological changes make bitcoin trading more and more popular. Virtual money (cryptocurrency) is no longer just a fashion, but it is more and more often used in practice on the Internet, and there are no statutory provisions in Polish law, which can lead to many legal complications. Bitcoin first appeared in 2008 thanks to a user disguised as Satoshi Nakamoto who published an article titled Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System. The concept of bitcoin was published in a nine-page document, and the essence of the concept was the actual creation, launch and placement of a software based on a very complex algorithm for generating bitcoin, based on e.g. on blockchain technology. Satoshi proposed a solution to the problem that had existed since the inception of the Internet, ie how to create a universal electronic payment system. The basic idea of the creator of the bitcoin system was to maintain the anonymity of transactions and property and to exclude unnecessary intermediaries from circulation. From the point of view of computer science, the bitcoin network is a decentralized database of information about the flow of certain numerical values between accounts of system users, where the above numerical values constitute the bitcoin currency. The state and public institutions, in turn, decide on the issue of this currency, its size and creation.The issue of bitcoin forces lawyers to investigate primarily at the level of civil law. The article presents the issues of bitcoin at the level of Polish civil law, and above all de lege lata considerations in the field of both civil and family law regarding the issue of bitcoin division after the divorce of spouses. Discrepancies appearing in the Polish doctrine on the civil law assessment of the nature of bitcoin are presented.