A few people around here know about the legal drama currently happening in France between us (Tibanne, MtGox and Macaraja, the company representing us in France) and french banks.
A few weeks ago, our previous French bank closed our bank account despite knowing about our activity, which we explained fully before starting. We challenged this decision in court, to which the bank tried to defend itself by saying "Bitcoin is an electronic money, Macaraja is not a bank, therefore it's illegal for Macaraja to be handling this". The court replied that it was not up to the bank to decide this, and ordered the bank to re-open the account.
The bank announced us they would close the account again, and did an appeal. They lost their appeal but closed the account anyway.
We have then brought them once again in front of a court, which this time again decided against the bank.
Court decision (in French):
http://demo.ovh.com/en/ec220dc8ec6778a9455fa7c77c991224/Now, that would be quite boring if there wasn't a little extra this time.
The bank keeps saying "Bitcoin is an electronic money, we saw it on internet. The internet is never wrong." (or something like that) while we have been citing parts of the laws regarding electronic money and how they have a fixed value against a fiat currency, and are issued by a central authority and can be exchanged back for fiat at anytime (that's what the law says).
This time, the court was not able to find a solution for this, so it declared the issue shall be reviewed by a regular court (we were using the court for emergency matters, as not having a bank account is having an enormous negative impact on our business in Europe) starting September 13th.
Chances are it'll take a few weeks/months before a final decision is taken, however starting September 13th, a French court will review the question "Is bitcoin a virtual currency". If it is, it'll be a real pain to handle it (will require a lot of declarations, and bitcoin exchanges operating in France will need to collect KYC-like information on every single customer - not mentionning the fact of being an online wallet will equivalent to be a bank), however if it's not, the question will remain open (we'll just know it's not a virtual currency, which will ease the requirements).
While this is just a decision made in France, under French laws, as the first decision ever taken in the world, it may set a precedent for other countries to look at before ruling on the status of bitcoin on their own.
