Criptomoneta e distacco dalla moneta legale: il caso Bitcoin

The very concept of legal money has been evolving over the last
decades, and particularly in the last years. Scriptural money or “bank money” is
now widely considered as an equivalent of paper money and coins, and as such a
main part of “sovereign money”.
In the last years, new species of “money”, free money and virtual money, have
increasingly been accepted as a mean of payment. The common characteristic of
these currencies is loss of referral to a central issuing authority directly or indirectly
controlled by a sovereign State. However, until very recently free and virtual money
have been circulating within small sized communities or among limited online
operators.
This has changed when a new encryption based virtual money, Bitcoin, has been
created. The success of Bitcoin have caused economists, sociologists and law
scholars to investigate its nature and scope.
The paper examines the history and possibile prospects of Bitcoin, taking both its
characteristic as technical device and its juridical nature into account. Given the
experience of abnormal fluctuations in its value (compared to fiat money and
common currencies) the conclusion is that Bitcoin does not seem to be able to be
considered as “proper” money, rather than a financial instrument of speculative
nature.