Tri Lingual Categorization of Opinions on Bitcoin and Crypto Currencies: An Islamic Perspective

Abstract

Bitcoin and other Virtual currencies (which are called “crypto currencies”) have been very popular during the last few years. Specially, in case of Bitcoin which became a hot topic on media when its price surged to $20,000 in 2017. People rushed towards it and tried to buy as much as they can. Muslim people started asking scholars about the Shariah guidance. That was a very new technology and scholars and legislators, both knew very little about them. Also there were many points which have to be considered before issuing Fatwa (Shariah guidance) like nature of money and its status according to Shariah, status of a money which have no guarantee or support from a government, possibility of fraud and hacking in these currencies and uncertainty if invested in them etc. Due to these points and difference of research results scholar have different opinions. The aim of this study is to collect popular opinions from Arabic, Urdu and English work and categorize their result so it can be easy to do more work on this topic.