Divorces in Italy during the Bitcoin era

With the increasing adoption of digital currencies as bitcoin, there are more and more cases where they appear during the separation of goods, creating confusion about their valuation and anonymity.

In countries where bitcoin is legal, it often happens that it is still not well regulated.

There are no laws, legal guidelines or specific guides and, considering the bureaucratic slowness, especially the Italian one, compared to the click to send a transaction in bitcoin, it is easy to lose track of the transactions.

In general, when you are called to declare your possessions before the judge, you are under oath.

The lawyer Chitroda, partner of Royds Withy King in the United Kingdom, said in a recent interview that he presided over three cases of divorce where the evaluation of crypto funds was not at all simple.

The volatility of the price recorded and the long waits in the divorce led to a continuous change in the valuation, taking into account that this was stated in pounds sterling.

Therefore, the solution proclaimed was to split the bitcoins and take advantage of the possibility of selling them on the exchanges.

Chitroda continues: “The courts have only recently begun to allow people to send documents to headquarters via email. We’re really going to have to speed up to keep up with all this. It’s a big challenge for all of us. We are working hard to educate ourselves and be ready“.

Jacqueline Fitzgerald, partner of Wilsons law firm, also explained: “Demonstrating that one of the spouses has a substantial stake in a cryptocurrency and adding it to the marital assets can be a big problem”.

The lack of centralization can lead many concerned spouses to hide their assets in digital currencies and then declare them. A crime that is certainly not easily unmasked.

There were already divorce cases in which assets were hidden, just think of all those actions carried out before the request for a divorce and recovered immediately after.

A spouse could hire digital experts to find the hidden cryptocurrencies but, this is such a long and expensive process that it could cost even more than the crypto assets you are looking for.

Cryptocurrencies are certainly becoming more and more a studied subject and lawyers should prepare for this change of scene: the transition from paper evidence to decentralized digital evidence.