Divorce is Messy – Especially When You Own Bitcoin

It ain’t easy owning bitcoin. Back in the day, you could own 50 BTC and nobody cared. But now that the digital currency is actually worth something, everyone wants a piece. Thieves, friends who didn’t listen, the taxman, and, when your marriage breaks down, your spouse. The blockchain might be immutable, but love isn’t. What happens to your bitcoin when you break up?

Also read: Mt Gox Creditors Petition the Court to Get Full Distribution of Bitcoins

Divorce: The Original Hard Fork

Dividing up bitcoin wasn’t an issue back in the day.

In most countries, divorce involves an equal division of assets, or at least one that sees both parties walk away with a sizeable chunk. Some assets, like the family dog, can’t easily be split into two, but a bitcoin goes into 100 million parts. What happens to your cryptocurrency when your partner files for divorce? If you thought dying was complicated, you should try getting a divorce.

Divorces don’t happen overnight. Generally they’re the consequence of a gradual breakdown, during which both parties have time to squirrel away assets. That may be immoral (as immoral as the behavior that prompted the divorce), but the practise is as old as marriage itself. Cases abound of husbands pleading poverty by the time the divorce comes to court due to bank accounts that have been mysteriously drained in the months prior, and of wives maxing out credit cards. Now imagine how easy it is for your partner to “give” their bitcoins away to a friend prior to a divorce being finalized.

Coin Split

As we enter an age in which couples’ assets are increasingly digitized and under their own control, dividing them should be simple in theory. Parting with half of one’s cryptocurrency collection doesn’t come easy however. That portfolio may have taken years of careful trading and countless late nights to acquire – exacerbating marital tensions in the process. Progressive males let their wife keep her surname and give up half their crypto come the divorce. Patriarchal oppressors put it all in monero and deny everything.

All joking aside, there is evidence of bitcoin being used to squirrel away assets in anticipation of a divorce. It’s a tactic which the men’s rights movement has supposedly endorsed, and it’s a hard one to counter. If a spouse were to plead that they had gambled away all their cryptocurrency or lost it on a scamcoin, who’s to prove otherwise?

No One Wants to Divorce in a Bull Market

The prospect of a cryptocurrency divorce raises some intriguing questions. Is your spouse due 50% of your assets based on their purchase price or their current market price? Could a recalcitrant partner be forced to hand over their digital assets? And if your partner were to offer you either a lump sum or 10% of their crypto gains for the next five years, what would choose?

Two Can Token

In an era where there are token sales for banana chips and 3D shoe fitting, it seems odd that there’s not been an ICO for smart contract-powered divorce. Joining the presale for a prenup platform may sound ridiculous, but there are weirder ERC20 tokens out there. If any entrepreneurs are interested, the Divorc.io domain and NUP token both appear to be unclaimed.

There’s a genuine use case for a token here, one in which the value of both real-world and digital assets (house, car, bitcoin) is represented by a corresponding number of tokens. These are locked in a multi-sig wallet which requires three keys to be unlocked, one of which resides with an attorney. Spouses cheat and love withers but cryptography never fails.

Would you give up half your bitcoins in the event of a divorce? Let us know in the comments section below.

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