Document Type
Article
Abstract
Virtual worlds (and their virtual currencies) can trace their roots to the days before computers when people gathered to play, for instance, various board games like Monopoly. As participants in these settings were understood to be engaged in an interactive form of entertainment, their actions there were generally recognized to belong to a realm separate from the real world in which normal rules of the real world were suspended and new rules of the virtual world were introduced. Originally set forth by Johan Huizinga in 1938, this “magic circle” concept of the demarcation of games from reality has gained prominence, at least among scholars and intellectual property lawyers, in drawing the social and legal boundaries of virtual realms. With the rise of the Internet, new innovations and challenges often make it difficult to enumerate the many elements protected within the fuzzy “magic circle,” in particular when plaintiff resort to outside legal remedies for internal disputes (e.g., virtual property rights and bots). At the heart of these issues is the growing trend of real monetary trading (RMT), the exchange of virtual objects with real currencies, which was estimated in 2011 by the World Bank to have a worldwide market worth several billion U.S. dollars. However, as we will see in our analysis of BitCoin in its present state falls outside of the protection of the “magic circle” and fits squarely into the domain of U.S. securities regulation.
Recommended Citation
Ruoke Yang,
When is Bitcoin a Security Under U.S. Securities Law?,
18 J. Tech. L. & Pol'y
(2013).
Available at: https://scholarship.law.ufl.edu/jtlp/vol18/iss2/1