Finland classifies Bitcoin as a commodity, not a currency

BITCOIN does not meet the definition of a currency or even an electronic payment form in Finland, where the central bank has instead decided to categorise the software as a commodity.

“Considering the definition of an official currency as set out in law, it’s not that. It’s also not a payment instrument, because the law stipulates that a payment instrument must have an issuer responsible for its operation,” Paeivi Heikkinen, the head of oversight at the Bank of Finland in Helsinki, said in an interview last week. “At this stage it’s more comparable to a commodity.”

Finland is the latest country to try to come to grips with the advent of virtual currencies that are not controlled by any central bank or government.

As regulators in Europe warn of the risks associated with using such software as a substitute for real money, authorities are struggling to design frameworks to protect consumers and businesses from potential losses they have no legal means of recouping.

In the Nordic region, Norway’s government has also decided Bitcoin does not qualify as a currency. Globally, Bitcoin has had a mixed reception, with China’s central bank banning lenders from handling the virtual money.

The US Internal Revenue Service has not offered guidance on Bitcoin beyond saying it was working on the issue and that it had been monitoring digital currencies and transactions since 2007. – Bloomberg Up the road in Pietermaritzburg, a mob, said to be four hundred strong, gathered in the Ash Road settlement and hounded everyone they deemed not to be South African out of the settlement, beating people and looting their homes and businesses as they went.

A few days before this xenophobic attack, land occupations in Durban and Cape Town were subject to unlawful evictions at the hands of armed men sent out by municipalities. In both cities, politicians and others have presented the presence of the people from the Eastern Cape in their cities in pathological terms. The language of “zero tolerance”, and the state violence that undergirds it, has been mobilised without regard for the letter of the law.

Last week fraud charges against tenderpreneur Shauwn Mpisane were withdrawn after the state failed to present any evidence to the Durban court. In the same city, no one has been arrested for the murder last year of three activists in Cato Manor.

The ANC’s manifesto for the coming election is framed in a very different language to the crudities that we’ve come to expect from people like Blade Nzimande and Marius Fransman. It promises that the party will “intensify the fight against corruption” and develop “participatory democracy” in the “new and far-reaching phase” of our “democratic transition”.

These words must be weighed against the lives of Rivombo, Tshele, Rahube and Seema; against the impunity with which people with the right connections can loot the state; against the destruction of people’s homes, whether by the state or a mob.

The ANC is not entirely rotten. But people like Pallo Jordan, Aaron Motsoaledi and Trevor Manuel are the exceptions that justify the rule. And in situations like these there is always a point, usually imprecise without the benefit of hindsight, at which holding out for better days as the rot spreads becomes unintended complicity.

The party is rotten at its core. It continues to attract the support of good people, but bitter experience has shown that its constant assurances of a return to its highest ideals cannot be trusted.

Loyalty to the idea of the ANC, to what it has stood for in the past and to what it has meant to people, can be a decent political position. But that ANC is well lost. Loyalty to the party as it actually exists is a form of complicity with the accumulation of bodies at the hands of an increasingly predatory state. Richard Pithouse teaches politics at Rhodes University. This article was first published by the SA Civil Society Information Service.