The motion was filed on the 25th of November 2015 by Dominique Bilde, Sophie Montel and Florian Philippot, according to a copy of the motion published on the European Parliament website, econotimes.com reports citing coindesk.com. The motion calls on the European Commission, the executive arm of the European Union, to “allow Member States to exercise stricter controls over all virtual currency exchange transactions and even to prohibit them”.
The document also draws attention to the recent ruling by the uropean Court of Justice that transactions involving the exchange of the virtual currency ‘Bitcoin’ for traditional currencies should be exempted from VAT. It cited the decision by Russia to make some transactions involving virtual currencies a criminal offence, owing to the high risk of their being used for illegal purposes.
Comparing the Bitcoin system to a Ponzi scheme, the filing says that there is a “high level of risk” in the Bitcoin system chiefly due to the anonymity feature, irreversibility of transactions, and it favours the first purchasers unduly thereby creating gross inequalities.
The calls for regulating the cryptocurrency ecosystem have heightened recently following the terrorist attacks in Paris. Ahead of a UN Security Council meeting on terrorist financing and the Islamic State, French Finance Minister Michel Sapin has claimed that he would push for greater oversight of Bitcoin transactions.
Sapin has said that Carrying bundles of cash in bags is no longer used. Terrorists have a capacity to use all the new technologies to transfer money around so we need together have identical rules in countries, the source reports citing Reuters.
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