While the number of individuals that make transactions using cryptocurrencies, particularly with Bitcoin, gradually increases, determining whether we can consider the users as “consumers” or not carries great importance.
Lawyer Mehmet Türkarslan
Legal Advisor of Paribu
Trading transactions of all “coin” and “tokens“, particularly Bitcoin, have been increasing rapidly. Today along with natural persons, legal entities are also investing in this area via cryptocurrency transaction platforms or evaluating to do so.
This being the case, the determination of the provision to apply in case of conflicts between the platforms and the users is important.
Even though the general view says that the users are “consumers”, it would be beneficial to further investigate the issue.
The consumer is defined as “natural or legal entities who act without commercial or professional objectives” in Article 3 of Law on the Protection of the Consumer numbered 6502. As understood from the definition, for an individual to be considered as a consumer, he should not act with commercial or professional objectives.
Investigating and understanding the incentives of users of the cryptocurrency transaction platforms will clarify the concept even further.
The user buying Bitcoin or any other coin/token performs this action to profit from it. The law mentioned above also covers consumer transactions. According to the law, consumer transaction refers to “any type of contract or legal transaction, including works of art, transportation, brokerage, insurance, attorneyship, banking, and similar contracts, which is drawn up between the consumers and natural or legal persons, who act with commercial and professional purposes, and natural or legal persons acting under the name or on behalf of such persons, including the public legal entities of markets of goods and services”. The concept of “transaction” specified by this article should be interpreted as “contract”.
Consumer’s acting without any commercial or professional purpose refers to the consumer’s buying, using, or consuming a commodity or service for special reasons such as for their own need or as a gift, in other words, depreciation, transformation, decrease, and depreciation of the commodity. The users trading on the cryptocurrency transaction platform aim at yielding momentary and/or continuous earnings from the cryptocurrencies they trade and in other words, they do so with a commercial purpose.
Therefore, regarding the cryptocurrency trading transactions performed with commercial motives, the users should not be deemed as consumers, and the users should take this into account while signing contracts on electronic environments.
Bu içerik en son 26 October 2022 tarihinde güncellenmiştir.
