Lloyd's Maritime and Commercial Law Quarterly
BITCOINERS IN WONDERLAND: LESSONS FROM THE CHESHIRE CAT
Matteo Solinas *
This article examines the legal boundaries of bitcoins, seeking to understand them at a time of rapid change. In doing so, it asks whether bitcoins can be conceived as property under English law, and how they can be alienated. It also highlights the distance between the conventional perception of ownership rights over bitcoins and the developments in market practice. The reality today is that bitcoins are held and traded on exchanges on terms inconsistent with the original techno-utopian belief that trust in a central authority could be replaced with trust in computer code and mathematics. After the euphoria of the past ten years, changes in market practice raise concerns (also) on the possibility that purchasers of bitcoins are not well informed on the inherent legal risks in the investment and exposed to learn the lesson of how financial bubbles operate the hard way.
I. INTRODUCTION
One of the most memorable characters in Alice in Wonderland is the grinning Cheshire Cat. Alice meets him sitting on a bough in a tree. The Cheshire Cat is not unpleasant or threatening. He simply enjoys to confuse and distract Alice. When she asks which way to go, he responds: “That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.” As Alice answers that she doesn’t care, he replies: “Then it doesn’t matter which way you go.” Alice will get somewhere, if she only walks long enough in one direction. This is perhaps a logical statement, but not exactly the answer to the question posed. It is an answer beyond Alice’s comprehension, where the cat patronises her gullibility. It is an unhelpful answer that reminds her of the many confusing things that adults living “above-ground” used to say, things that Alice did not understand and from which Alice did not learn anything. In the subsequent inquiry on what sort of people live in Wonderland, the oft-quoted dialogue takes place:1
* Senior Lecturer, Victoria University of Wellington. I am grateful to Alexandra Santangelo-Reif, Lukas Kristen and those attending the BFSLA colloquium (held in Sydney in November 2018) and the Victoria Law School research seminar (held in Wellington in March 2019) for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article. The usual disclaimer applies.
Unless otherwise stated, all URLs were last accessed 4 April 2019.
1. L Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Collins Classics, reprinted, London, 2010), 90.
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