The Estonian Supreme Court has decided to restrict bitcoin trading activities ahead of a decision in a legal case against a digital currency broker.
This decision is a direct move against the bitcoin and all the other cryptocurrencies trading amid the ongoing lawsuit, which asked also about the legality of digital currency and is widely monitored by cryptocurrency-focused media in the Baltic country.
This case started in 2014, as the Estonian police investigated bitcoin entrepreneur Otto de Voogd, who was operating a digital currency exchange called BTC.ee which was shut down by the country’s law enforcement agencies. De Voogd stated in a Reddit nore, that Estonia was “the worst country in EU for bitcoin, blockchain tokens and assets”.
The current Supreme Court order may not be helping the bitcoin ecosystem now. The order to implement bitcoin regulations will bring outdated laws that were designed for the fiat based monetary system to oversee digital currency based transactions. These outdated regulations do not have necessary provisions included in them to overlook bitcoin and other digital currencies. This will in turn only create more problems to cryptocurrency ecosystem by stifling innovation and harming new-age businesses built around digital currencies and blockchain technology.
There are specific limits on how exchange services in Estonia must interface with their customers. The court ruling confirms only that regulation of alternative methods of payment include this digital currency, given its characteristics – a move that brings it under the country’s anti-money laundering (AML) statutes, even if it is not explicitly spelled out.
But Estonia is well-known for being a digital currency-unfriedly zone, what is confirmed by a statement from the beginning of the year 2014, where an official from the Baltic country’s central bank called the digital currency a “problematic scheme”. Then Estonia supported the value-added tax (VAT) in the European Union to be applied to the full value of bitcoin trades, when the European Court of Justice (ECJ) was considering it. Nevertheless, the ECJ exempted bitcoin transactions from VAT
Otto de Voogd’s appeal to operate a bitcoin exchange was turned down twice – once by the Tallinn Administrative Court and the Tallinn Circuit Court – before the Supreme Court drove the final nail in the coffin. In order to set a precedence, Otto de Voogd had crowdsourced his legal fight to give the digital currency a fair chance to thrive in Estonia. However, it looks like he failed.
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