December 28, 2017
Pennsylvania couples who are getting a divorce may need to divide assets and debts, and for some, bitcoins may be among the assets. The currency has increased in value and become better-known in the process, and it might increasingly feature in divorce cases.
The nature of bitcoins means that they can be easy assets to conceal in a divorce. Some websites actually encourage this. A person could claim to have given away the bitcoins to someone else, and this would probably be untraceable. A bitcoin account might even be a trigger for the divorce itself since a person might have spent a lot of time building it up.
Additional complications may be introduced in dividing the account. For example, the account’s value could either be assessed based on current value or on purchase price.
Distributing assets from a bitcoin account might be done over a period of time based on a percentage of profits or could be done at once as a lump sum.
In a high-asset divorce, there might be many other assets to divide as well as ways to hide them. For example, shell companies or offshore accounts could be a way to conceal assets. A person who believes a spouse is hiding assets might want to discuss the possibility with an attorney since this is not permitted. Shared marital property that needs to be divided could include real estate holdings, closely-held businesses, retirement accounts and more. All of these assets will present their own unique challenges for assessing value and dividing.
