Is Bitcoin out of Reach for Private International Law?

Abstract

Bitcoin was launched in 2008 and appears as the first application of the blockchain technology. It remains, to date, the best known and the most used cryptocurrency. Like other cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin aims to become an alternative to State and multistate currencies, such as the Euro. The importance it has gained in practice over the past few years has grasped the attention of legal scholars, who tend to perceive Bitcoin as a challenge to traditional legal rules and therefore reflect upon the ways the latter can be applied to this technological new deal. Although these reflections concern, first and foremost, rules of substantive law, such as contract law, they also extend to Private International Law (PIL). From the latter perspective, Bitcoin raises two types of issues. The first one relates to the ability of PIL to tackle legal relationships involving the use of bitcoins, while the second one concerns the ways in which PIL rules can be implemented to these relationships. This article seeks to demonstrate that all the objections raised against the applicability of PIL to Bitcoin, whether they are based on the existence of an alleged non-State, self-regulated, legal order of the lex cryptographica, on the impossibility to situate legal relationships implying the use of bitcoins in the physical space, or on the pseudonymity of participants in the blockchain, can be overcome without having to introduce sweeping changes to PIL rules. Indeed, the latter rules can rather easily adapt to Bitcoin and grasp its hybrid nature of asset and of currency.