The young Croatian national, who managed the world’s most successful DDoS service Webstresser, has made profit in the virtual cryptocurrency bitcoin, said the judge of the County Court in Velika Gorica, near Zagreb, on Thursday.
In a decision to hold the suspect in one-month pre-trial detention, the court said that, by April 24, 2018, he had made a profit in Bitcoin amounting to approximately 1.5 million Croatian kuna (around €200,000).
By ruling that the Webstresser manager had made profit in cryptocurrency, the cour went against the views of the central bank (HNB), the tax authority, and the Finance Ministry, all of which strongly oppose classifying virtual cryptocurrencies as money, reported Poslovni Dnevnik daily on Thursday.
HNB said at the end of 2013 that bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies were not money, but represented goods, similar to the virtual gold in the game World of Warcraft, or Linden dollars in the online virtual world Second Life.
“Bitcoin cannot be considered to be e-money, because it does not represent a financial claim to the issuer, and, on top of that, the issuer of bitcoin is not in Croatia. Instead, the service is provided via a virtual internet network,” HNB said at the time.
Bitcoin, invented in 2009, was designed to be the first decentralised digital currency. It works without a central bank or administrators. The transactions on the peer-to-peer network take place directly between users, with no intermediaries. However, the question whether bitcoin actually is a currency or not is still disputed, as economists agree that it does not quite meet the criteria necessary to be defined as money.
Although the case has created a lot of commotion in the cryptocommunity, the head of the Association for Blockchain and Cryptocurrencies (UBIK), Vlado Hrdalo, said that, legally speaking, this court decision did not have any weight.
“Bitcoins are not the issue here, because the case in question deals with the potential criminal offence, not with defining the nature of cryptocurrencies,” Hrdalo said.
The 19-year-old was arrested on April 24 and charged with crimes against computer systems. If convicted, he could spend up to eight years in prison. The one-month detention period was set due to “the existence of special circumstances which point to the danger of (the suspect) repeating the felony.”
(€1 = 7.41 kuna)
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