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Finland tax authorities matching Bitcoin transactions and bank transfers

metropolitan.fi

131–140 of 147 posts

Re: Finland tax authorities matching Bitcoin transactions and bank transfers

#131
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crypto is a legitimate investment. It's an entirely new asset class. If you think it's going away anytime soon you're delusional. 5 years ago you could buy 1 BTC for $100 USD. And at that point it wasn't even new. 1 year ago you could buy 1 ETH for about $50. The average person would struggle very hard to find any investment that goes 80X in 5 years, or 12X in one year. With Bitcoin and crypto, lots of regular people…

High returns != legitimate investment

Fixed supply, instantly audit-able, open source, decentralized. In many ways, you know a lot more about what you're buying with Bitcoin than with equities.

Re: Finland tax authorities matching Bitcoin transactions and bank transfers

#132
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand where you are coming from, but let me add that this method of counting income applies to any investment income. So say you put money into an index fund, but something unexpected happens. If you need to liquidate your savings while being a student, the government will slap your fingers for trying to think long-term. Either way, I admit this only affects the poor -- if you are a bit better off you should b…

So say you put money into an index fund, but something unexpected happens. If you need to liquidate your savings while being a student, the government will slap your fingers for trying to think long-term. Not really much of a concern, as you would have to be wealthy enough to have spare money to put into an index fund while retaining enough liquid assets to cover your living expenses. By making yourself the sole owne…

> Not even remotely true. SMLLCs are disregarded entities for tax purposes, so their transactions are taxed directly to their owners. And legally, the concept of veil-piercing applies to SMLLCs generally, and especially to undercapitalized SMLLCs (meaning any LLC without sufficient independent assets to pay off all liabilities against it).

This is true in Finland, which has fewer forms of corporations than the US for example. The corporation can decide to not pay out all of its earnings to its sole shareholder, but in such situation, the company needs to pay an additional 20% tax for the retained amount of money, for conducting a successful year of operations. This is rarely a good idea, but in this case where the owner is subject to constraints of personal income imposed by the government, it might make sense.

Re: Finland tax authorities matching Bitcoin transactions and bank transfers

#133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like it's being taxed like gambling rather than investing. You don't get to write off a massive loss at the casino, and if you have a net loss you still owe on the nights you came out ahead.

In the US gambling losses are deductible, to the limit of your winnings, according to this. https://www.google.com/amp/s/turbotax.intuit.com/tax-tips/jo...

But not in Finland. So at least their tax law has symmetry in this regard.

Re: Finland tax authorities matching Bitcoin transactions and bank transfers

#134
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

High returns != legitimate investment

Fixed supply, instantly audit-able, open source, decentralized. In many ways, you know a lot more about what you're buying with Bitcoin than with equities.

That's very true now that you mention it, equities are not open source or decentralized. I'm liquidating my portfolio and going all in

Re: Finland tax authorities matching Bitcoin transactions and bank transfers

#135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, for sure. But there can be a secondary market if people accept Monero directly, so you don't have to convert.

It always surprises me how casually crypto currency enthusiasts treat wilful money laundering and tax fraud.

Often with palpable enthusiasm, right before whining about the assumption that most non-speculative transactions are illegal.

Re: Finland tax authorities matching Bitcoin transactions and bank transfers

#136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, for sure. But there can be a secondary market if people accept Monero directly, so you don't have to convert.

It always surprises me how casually crypto currency enthusiasts treat wilful money laundering and tax fraud.

They’re almost as bad as the “sovereign citizen” crowd, more numerous, and just as sanctimonious. Maybe Blockchain has a future, but this current crop of money launderers and thieves don’t. Between the SEC in the US and tax authorities elsewhere, it’s a just a matter of time before having an immutable ledger of these activists is shown to be a really bad idea.

Re: Finland tax authorities matching Bitcoin transactions and bank transfers

#137
post #7

All they're doing is looking for bank transactions to crypto exchanges in citizens' accounts. What this article doesn't tell, is that the current cryptocurrency taxation in Finland is unreasonable. You pay 30-34% tax on any profit, but you can not deduct losses. If you had bought 1 BTC at $1000, another at $14000, and sold both at $3000 you would owe $600 in taxes even though you lost $9000. You can imagine how peopl…

Wait until you hear how BTC transactions are taxed in Poland: they are subject to a 1% tax on civil law transactions (TCTL).

The worst part isn't that you pay 1% on transactions where you lost money. The worst part is that you are supposed to fill and send the tax form for each individual transaction. Now imagine automated trading, making hundreds of transactions per day - I suppose the cost of paper for printing those tax forms would outweigh any potential gains.

Re: Finland tax authorities matching Bitcoin transactions and bank transfers

#138

Having an immutable public ledger should make collecting taxes easier.

I fully agree.

The whole idea of income tax is flawed.

Define richer (poorer) as having more (less) wealth: unit is say dollars.

Define net income as the time-derivative of wealth: unit is dollars per day.

Now conflate income and wealth in school. Justify taxing income as if it was redistribution from rich to poor, while it is in fact redistribution from high incomme to low income: i.e. a rich person with substantial capital, who has lost his job, can apply for income support, even though he still has money in the bank. In order to get out of poverty a poor person has to earn money at a faster rate than average, so will be heavier taxed.

Income taxation is not a redistribution from rich to poor, it is a means to slow down changes to the status quo. It is a brake on social mobility.

With decentralized ledgers, we can easily tax all wealth equally by printing money. The problem is not that money is being created out of thin air, but that this freshly minted money is not considered property of the group, instead it is property of the central banks, which act like unions for private banks.

Taxing by freshly minting is much cheaper to implement, and removes the whole legal loopholes with secret walkthroughs etc. i.e. people can focus on providing a service and earning money (roughly twice as fast since no income taxation) instead of puzzling through all the rules and exemptions in order to be able to do their job.

Re: Finland tax authorities matching Bitcoin transactions and bank transfers

#139
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I prefer the simpler policy, but strongly oppose the 10% net worth tax! > I'm not sure whether anyone would complain Maybe the billionaires would complain? Or is their sacrifice necessary for your greater good? I would also complain. It's unethical. And, we don't need yet another tax on the most value-bearing (and typically philanthropic) people in society, to be collected by the most violent organization in history,…

>we don't need yet another tax on the most value-bearing (and typically philanthropic) people in society If we assume for a moment that this is true, then why would this state of affairs be okay? Society cannot run on the philanthopy of billionaires. Further, there's not very much evidence that this is actually true. In terms of largest individual contributions, yes, many billionaires make impressive donations and pa…

> Society cannot run on the philanthopy of billionaires.

Well, it doesn't run on taxes either. Successful societies runs on voluntary exchange.

Given how much of the taxes are paid by the ultra wealthy (most of them), how philanthropic they are (very), and how wasteful the government is (impressively), why would you assume that voluntary philanthropy cannot replace involuntary, state-managed welfare?

Re: Finland tax authorities matching Bitcoin transactions and bank transfers

#140
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sympathize with the consistency of a "pure universal" approach to policy, but like many purist policy philosophies, I don't think it would survive rigorous implementation. For so many reasons. Chief among them, maybe, people are generally reluctant to support governments engaged in transfers of resources from themselves to billionaires.

Yes, they are. However, programs which do not require meeting any qualifications are massively easier to implement, which can make them much cheaper overall - think of all of the bureaucracy required for applying for and evaluating if various people meet the thresholds for programs, plus all of the appeals processes. Then it becomes two questions: is the cost of enforcing the thresholds greater than the cost of just…

> However, programs which do not require meeting any qualifications are massively easier to implement, which can make them much cheaper overall -

I agree you can get some efficiency gains from eliminating thresholds.

Back of the napkin, though, you're talking about an implementation cost delta (ie, only threshold determination costs) that swamps the benefit-and all other implementation costs-by several multiples, maybe an order of magnitude, depending on the size of the targeted group.

But ok... Although it's not my intuition that threshold costs would significantly outstrip the savings from targeting, it's just a factual question. For the sake of argument, say that happens in a case.

Then yeah, that's a great candidate for universality.

If those are the cases you want to focus on... Are we then agreeing that universality is preferable only in those cases where it pays for itself?

Because that is totally consistent with my position. If you only want universality when it's cheaper then we already agree and can just defer to the CBO.

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