Commentary on Supreme Court of Spain's 'Sentencia' No. 326/2019 Bitcoin and its framing as currency

Abstract

The insertion of cryptocurrencies in daily negotiations is an inexorable reality, being bitcoin the most popularly known and exchanged type in the whole world. With constant price variations, negotiations involving bitcoins have the potential to degrade or inflate the quantification of the pecuniary consideration that investors are willing to pay, generating damages. This led the Spanish Supreme Court to render an unprecedented decision: Sentencia nº 326/2019, the result of a criminal proceeding related to the alleged practice of cryptocurrency fraud, which imposed, in addition, civil liability and the duty to repair damages caused to victims of trading operations, but in currency—not in bitcoins. Based on this problem, these comments will analyze the framing of bitcoin (and related technologies that use the blockchain) as currencies and the impacts  thereof for the quantification of civil liability torts. The research will use the inductive method, investigating central aspects of the precedent under scrutiny, with bibliographical-doctrinal support, in a progressive-amplifying sense, aiming to identify some legal institutes affected by the outcome of the decision. In the end, final considerations will be put forth, from which a more assertive understanding of the explicit problem will attemptedly be extracted.