Digital payment schemes show an ever increasing importance. Out of the countless different schemes available this article focuses on the popular Bitcoin system.

The authors provide a description of Bitcoin’s unique technological basis and its accompanying ecosystem of users, miners, trading platforms and vendors. This article discusses Bitcoin’s currency-like features and the first regulatory actions take in the European Union and in the United States of America.

This paper takes an in-depth look into the technology behind the Bitcoin system, how it works as a currency and as a medium exchange. As the Bitcoin system offers an alternative way to send and receive money, it also means that the laws surrounding it – if any – are different to that of fiat currencies.

Discover some of the key differences between the two, how changes in regulation could alter the Bitcoin system permanently and why data protection is important in both realms. In this article, the authors present the technical basis of Bitcoin (Section 2) and discuss its legal classification (Section 3). They then report on developments in a number of countries (Section 4) alongside with major incidents in the Bitcoin ecosystem (Section 5). We cope with data protection issues (Section 6)
before concluding the article in Section 7. Access the report for free to find out more about the Bitcoin System.