a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment
am_Unition  ·  3900 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Bitcoin is taxable property - not currency

One concern I have with BitCoin is that if left unregulated (and provided that it continues to gain acceptance) it offers an easy avenue for massive transactions to take place between criminal organizations. You're removing one level of inconvenience in eliminating the need for money laundering. If regulated, algorithms could be put in place (actually, I think they exist already, to a degree) that would generate reports of suspicious activity. But then if you were clever enough, you could just write code to circumvent this problem. We'd have to limit each person to one unique BTC account. Food for thought.

I skimmed the notice, I'm not in total disagreement, BitCoin mining being treated as a self-employed business... ehhh, that doesn't seem unreasonable. But reporting BTC transactions in terms of USD to tax the transactions themselves... What is this, CoinStar? A stock trading service? Also, if BitCoin crashes before I submit my tax report, I could be paying taxes for something now completely worthless.

The demonstrated volatility of BitCoin undermines this whole report a bit, but it's good we're at least trying to develop a methodology for treatment of a global currency. This is a pretty bad start though.

I'd also like to point out the idiocy of requiring someone to file a paper-based report of already-logged digital activity in 2014, and expecting them to follow the honors system. Hah.