Why it exists
Bitcoin has excellent free resources on how it works technically. It has almost nothing on what happens when it meets the legal system: inheritance, probate, exchanges, compliance demands, the machinery of financial regulation.
That gap has a specific cause. The people who understand Bitcoin well and the people who understand law well do not overlap very often, and where they do, the output tends to be billable rather than public.
This is the public version.
The rule everything here follows
Every resource on this site is written to be structurally durable. That means explaining how something works rather than what the current number is.
You will not find a threshold, a tax rate, a filing deadline or a country-by-country table anywhere on this site. Those figures change every year, and a stale legal resource is worse than none, because it is confidently wrong.
Instead, each page explains the mechanism and shows you how to find the current position yourself. That knowledge does not expire.
Who wrote it
These pages are published under the pen name Satoshi's Lawyer, alongside The Bitcoin Act, a twice-weekly newsletter on Bitcoin law and regulation.
Nothing here is legal advice, nothing here is written in a professional capacity, and nobody here is your lawyer. The purpose of the site is to help you understand the shape of a legal question well enough to take it to someone who can advise you on it.
What it is not
It is not legal advice. This site does not provide legal advice, no professional or advisory relationship is created, and nothing here is tailored to your situation. Law varies enormously between jurisdictions and changes over time.
The purpose of these pages is to help you ask better questions and recognise competent advice when you receive it. Use them to prepare for a conversation with a qualified lawyer where you live, not to replace it.
Money
There is none. No advertising, no affiliate links, no sponsorship, no tracking, no analytics, no email capture. The only outbound commercial link on the site is to the newsletter, which is free to read.
Where a page points you to somewhere else, it is because it is genuinely useful, not because anyone is paying for the mention. This site recommends no publication, no exchange, no wallet and no service, and has no affiliate relationship, sponsorship, commission or agreement with anyone.
If a page ever recommends a product, assume something has gone wrong and tell me.
Corrections
Corrections are genuinely welcome, particularly on jurisdictional detail. Probate procedure, formality requirements and tax treatment differ in ways no single account can capture, and readers who practise in a given country routinely know things this site does not.
Email hello@thebitcoinact.xyz and it reaches me directly. Say which page, quote the sentence, and give the jurisdiction you are writing about. Corrections that identify a specific error get made quickly; the editorial rule above means most fixes are small.
Copying it
Everything here is published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence (CC BY 4.0), the same licence named in the footer of every page. Copy it, translate it, republish it, print it, hand it to your lawyer, build on it commercially. The only condition is attribution.
Translations are especially welcome. Email hello@thebitcoinact.xyz before you start, so that two people do not translate the same page.
General information, not legal advice. This site does not provide legal advice, and no professional or advisory relationship is created. Consult a qualified lawyer licensed where you live.