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IRS reminds taxpayers to report virtual currency transactions

irs.gov

221–230 of 278 posts

Re: IRS reminds taxpayers to report virtual currency transactions

#221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No surprise that in both Great Britain and the US, the income tax was first instituted during a time of war. Only during a war, with the demands it places on the public conscience to make sacrifices, would the population acquiesce to an institution so contrary to natural rights and so pernicious to liberty.

There's got to be a better term than "reverse virtue signaling" to describe how the use of specific terminology (outside of a legal setting) like "pernicious", "females", or "virtue signaling" instantly means that someone can be safely dismissed.

Does "pernicious" have some kind of political connotation now?

Re: IRS reminds taxpayers to report virtual currency transactions

#222
post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not maximum possible. This isn't that difficult to compute. Not so long ago, 1099-B only showed the sale price of stocks (funds, etc) and you had to go back and compute basis yourself from the confirmations, even if the asset purchase was 50 years ago. It's no different for a house sale. Having a CPA doesn't help at all whatsoever to compensate for bad record keeping. There are other ways to do this that would be sim…

> tax equals 1-2% of the asset value per year, rather than taxing the income So penalize everyone in down years when their stocks lose money, plus wipe out a ton of potential growth in 401k accounts? At least, that's what it sounds like to me.

Lack of imagination. First, the biggest complaint sould be that it's regressive. Second, no one would accept 1-2% tax on retirement assets, even though this would actually benefit them over a long haul: grow tax free for 40 years, and then pay a n% asset tax, where n=asset pool (your retirement account) age?

Almost everyone does better with Roth versions of IRAs and 401(k)'s anyway. Pay the tax up front, no tax at the back end, and thus basis and record keeping isn't even relevant.

There's a bunch of ways to simplify this while also making it fair if it weren't for the greedy rich people who want regressive taxes, i.e. flat tax.

Re: IRS reminds taxpayers to report virtual currency transactions

#223
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still find it weird that he has to pay taxes in dollars on something that he doesn't know the value of in dollars since he hasn't converted his cryptocurrency assets to fiat yet.

Vanguard allows me to exchange one mutual fund for another mutual fund (without having to explicitly sell and re-buy). Do you think that's something that shouldn't be taxable? Where's the difference to the cryptocurrency example above?

Depends on the technical contract but per IRS rules are that when you trade one asset for another, you are virtually selling the asset and buying another. They did it to keep accounting simple.

Re: IRS reminds taxpayers to report virtual currency transactions

#224
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If I buy 60000 XRP for 4 BTC, what is my cost basis? For the BTC? The USD value at the time you bought them. > Do I have to keep track of how much those bitcoins were worth when I traded? Yes > What if I don't have that data? You can get the transaction date via the block chain or your exchanges reporting and then lookup the USD value at the time. > How is that calculation supposed to account for actual liquidation…

> You can get the transaction date via the block chain or your exchanges reporting and then lookup the USD value at the time. What if the exchange I traded on doesn't have a USD Fiat pairing? Can I use any price from any exchange that day? Can I report $0.06/BTC for an xrp sale on 4/16, the date of the major coinbase flash crash? Does it have to be the exact price at the exact time? Can I choose the USD value of the…

It kind of sounds like you're trying to think of tax law as some sort of CTF programming game where you're supposed to find the exploit. That's definitely not what tax law is.

You should report your taxes as honestly as possible, using reasonable prices for things.

Re: IRS reminds taxpayers to report virtual currency transactions

#225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is called ad hominem. No matter how tempting it is, it's better to refrain from it. Focusing on superficial and peripheral qualities like use of particular words, instead of the claim being made, is fundamentally anti-intellectual.

There's nothing anti-intellectual about questioning your phrasing. You're just pissed that anyone is calling attention to your rhetorical tactics, because that blunts their effect. And without the flowery language, your comment has almost no substance. Stripping your comment of its rhetorical content to get at the logical meat of the argument is required in order to have an honest intellectual discussion.

It's not merely questioning phrasing. It's saying that use of a certain set of words, including "pernicious" and "female", is an indicator of holding beliefs that are so wrong that the comment warrants total dismissal.

>>You're just pissed that anyone is calling attention to your rhetorical tactics,

But using a word like "female" is not a rhetorical tactic.. You're imparting motives without any evidence beyond broad paranoid generalizations.

It might be part of a rhetorical tactic in some particular instance, but I can't assume it indicates that based on the use of the word alone. That would be ridiculous and anti-intellectual.

It's Orwellian to effectively blacklist a particular set of words as wrongthink, and it is disingenuous to claim that the use of these words is a "rhetorical tactic", or that calling for comments containing these words to be ignored is merely "questioning the phrasing".

Re: IRS reminds taxpayers to report virtual currency transactions

#226

Another point everyone should remember because I’ve seen the attitude a lot recently. If the reporting requirements seem to be literally impossible to comply with, this doesn’t mean you conclude “so I don’t have to pay taxes”. It means you should conclude “I have to pay the maximum taxes possible under the worst case scenario because I don’t have the records to prove my version of events”. It has nothing to do with c…

I work as a tax auditor and this is completely false.

Taxpayers only need to pay the MINIMUM amount of tax required by law, not the maximum. If you are audited then we will tell you why you owe additional tax. No, you will not go to jail for paying less tax but upon audit you will be required to pay the deficiency or provide additional explanations/documents etc. Then you can introduce any counter arguments like you didn't know such a law exists, the tax code is ambiguous etc. Making these types of claims will help to provide case law to clarify it for others as well as for auditors.

I agree that the taxation of crypto related transaction is quite ambiguous when you start getting into the theoretical nature of how the transaction is conducted.

Re: IRS reminds taxpayers to report virtual currency transactions

#227
post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's talking crypto, not stocks. A brokerage company operating outside of the US has zero reason to supply you with any specific US tax docs.

A US person (for tax purposes) should not be dealing with a brokerage company operating outside of the US. The US government has decided that the only reason someone would do that is to evade taxes (although money laundering is a nice cover story) and punishes such behaviour with accordingly with additional paperwork and bureaucratic headaches. A brokerage company operating outside of the US should still be sending y…

The FBI stole my Litecoins from BTC-E ... I didn't even claim that loss because it was very small.

Re: IRS reminds taxpayers to report virtual currency transactions

#228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's nothing anti-intellectual about questioning your phrasing. You're just pissed that anyone is calling attention to your rhetorical tactics, because that blunts their effect. And without the flowery language, your comment has almost no substance. Stripping your comment of its rhetorical content to get at the logical meat of the argument is required in order to have an honest intellectual discussion.

It's not merely questioning phrasing. It's saying that use of a certain set of words, including "pernicious" and "female", is an indicator of holding beliefs that are so wrong that the comment warrants total dismissal. >>You're just pissed that anyone is calling attention to your rhetorical tactics, But using a word like "female" is not a rhetorical tactic.. You're imparting motives without any evidence beyond broad…

Considering that your comment at issue didn't actually contain a gratuitous use of "female", you perhaps shouldn't focus too much of your argument on that bit and instead defend yourself only in regards to what you're actually being accused of.

You've repeatedly used the term "natural right" without defining what you mean by that, and without explaining why income taxes are a particularly egregious infringement on those rights. All you've done vaguely state that income taxes infringe on a category of rights that by their very name can only be infringed unjustly.

"Pernicious" is not a word that anyone uses conversationally today. It's archaic. (According to Google Ngram, usage of "pernicious" peaked around the time of the American Revolution.) A phrase like "pernicious to liberty" is the kind of thing you write when you want to give the impression that you're quoting a famous scholar from a few centuries ago. It does nothing to explain how income taxes are exceptionally harmful to liberty compared to other means of funding a government. This is not to say that you cannot use the word "pernicious", but your use of it is remarkable. In reality, you're borrowing language from what seems to be a contemporary anti-tax crackpot.

All you did was use uncommon language to repeatedly assert that income taxes are bad. You said nothing to actually support that assertion or provide any more detail. There was nothing superficial or peripheral about your word choice; it was clearly the most carefully thought out aspect of your comment. There's no content in your comment to have a meaningful discussion about except the rhetorical tactics and allusions.

And to cap it off, your first response to criticism was an incorrect usage of the term ad hominem.

Re: IRS reminds taxpayers to report virtual currency transactions

#229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s just experience in dealing with people online. I apply the same filter to “cuck,” “Overton window” and “Hegelian dialectic” for example. Offline it’s much easier to ascertain intentions and attitudes, and there aren’t millions of people all screaming at once. Online you have to filter, and alt-right buzzwords are excellent components of a healthy filter.

It's a very anti-intellectual approach to dialog. It explicitly ignores the logic of the argument being made. It disqualifies any language containing words that are allegedly associated with some ideological perspective from even being considered. It creates an ideological echo chamber, as it is completely intolerant to any view that even hints at falling outside of it. If you do utilize such heuristics, at least don…

I encourage you to spend time in actual academic fora, where language choice absolutely will get you disqualified from a conversation. Nobody is obligated to listen to anybody.

Re: IRS reminds taxpayers to report virtual currency transactions

#230
post #89

A tax CPA I used in the past advised me with (hundreds of) short term equity trades to just present the before and after figures, since that represented the true income. They explained that in their experience, that was satisfactory to the IRS. It is unrealistic to expect people making frequent trades to carefully document every trade (unless perhaps that is their profession). It's even worse for cryptocurrencies, si…

Isn't it the case that all bitcoin transactions are in some kind of . . . what do you call it . . . ledger? And don't we know roughly the price of bitcoin in USD at all times? It seems like it would be pretty easy to import all this info into a spreadsheet or even just a little Python script to calculate everything correctly according to wash rules and what have you.
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