Reviewing the boundary between valuables and financial assets in SNA 2008 in the light of Bitcoin and similar crypto-assets and the UK experience of non-monetary gold

Gold and certain crypto-assets, such as Bitcoin, have several clear similarities. Both are highly liquid, demonstrating volatile quantities of trade and prices, but do not have a corresponding liability. At the current time under SNA08, non-monetary gold is treated as a Valuable, as a produced non-financial asset. During the process of developing propositions for updating the SNA it was proposed that crypto-assets without corresponding liability should be classified in the same way. This argument in the case of crypto-assets was rejected, partly as a result of an earlier draft of this paper, so these crypto-assets are instead recommended to be classified as a financial asset. This paper argues that non-monetary gold used for investment purposes should be similarly classified as a financial asset, both because the existing guidance is incomplete but also because by its nature it is a better conceptual match to being treated as a financial asset without corresponding liability, in the same way as monetary gold. This paper then proposes that if a wider category of financial assets without corresponding liability is being considered, this would form the natural home for crypto-assets without corresponding liability.