That stance is called the rule of law and being technically correct matters. That's the whole point of that court thing.
http://time.com/money/4421955/bitcoin-miami-judge-money-laun...
As one of many factors. The rule of law does not suspend human reason and common sense. SCOTUS recently ruled in favour of original intent over a strictly structural in an ACA case, where the later would have meant literally interpreting a likely typo [1].
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/courts_law/obamacare...
>Playing dumb only makes you look dumb.
Laws typically don't incorporate definitions of words used when they aren't used in a special sense in the law.
> My Bitcoin is a digital representation of the bits needed to solve a particular block.
No doubt.
> It doesn't represent value,
The "X needed for Y" have value to the extent Y has value; I would suggest that there is considerable evidence which might be marshaled that solving Bitcoin blocks has value.
So, I would think that your explanation of what Bitcoin does represent supports the conclusion that it is a digital representation of value, not that it is not such a representation.
>“Digital currency” means any digital representation of value
You can't classify something as digital currency without knowing what value means or how to measure it.
It may be important to this law, but that doesn't mean that it is used specially (as in, in any but its most contextually-obvious general-use sense) in the law.
I mean, the meaning of "is" is also very important to the meaning of most laws, but is rarely defined in the enactment.
> You can't classify something as digital currency without knowing what value means
True, but that doesn't take a non-standard, law-specific definition.
> or how to measure it.
Untrue -- quantification of value is not relevant to the definition.
Value is being discussed (even though you appear to be using an unrevealed definition) as a quantity (maybe, I am wrong, and it is not a quantity), which means there must be a way to quantify it.
For someone to claim that the numbers I hold represent something else, is an error.
You're not really arguing that currency derives its value from the material cost of producing it, are you? Because then everything is a currency. Modern currencies are special precisely because they have much more value than their material cost.
My Bitcoin is a digital representation of the bits needed to solve a particular block. It doesn't represent value, but a numerical solution to a mathematical problem.