Are Bitcoins Ownable? Property Rights, IP Wrongs, and Legal-Theory Implications

Bitcoin has fresh implications for economics and law at many levels. This book addresses whether bitcoins ought to be considered ownable under an action-based approach to property theory, which—like bitcoin itself—transcends the boundaries of existing positive law jurisdictions. Beyond instinctive answers is a rich opportunity to examine the many technical facts and legal-theory issues involved. Bitcoin has a unique new place among types of economic goods, between the physically and spatially defined goods of property theory and the copiable, abstract ideas, patterns, and methods associated with IP rights. It does not fall so easily into existing categories.

The author brings together here for the first time his work in an approach to legal philosophy grounded directly in the analysis of human action, which he has termed action-based jurisprudence, with his several years of writing about bitcoin from a monetary theory perspective and contributing through articles, presentations, and video productions to raising general public understanding of how Bitcoin works on a technical level.