331–340 of 416 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Weren't they treated more like property then?
I think Like-Kind is the term. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but IIRC any crypto-for-crypto was a Like-Kind exchange prior to Jan 1, 2018.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> for the most part it's been as practical as a card and often faster Have you ever used a card? If you think that opening your phone, scanning a QR and then hitting "verify" is faster than a tap or swipe of your credit card, I'm not sure what to tell you. Best case scenario, they're about the same. > I can call up my card company and claim a fraudulent charge after getting the goods And they'll investigate and deter…
I of course use a card frequently, though have yet to have the "pleasure" of dealing with a tap-to-pay card. I don't really want to. I'd say average case (not best case) is they're about the same, but yes, getting out my phone and unlocking it, opening the bitcoin app, scanning the QR code and hitting confirm, then putting my phone away, is indeed often faster than getting out my wallet, picking out my card from the…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
New scams have been sending fake letters claiming to be from the irs.
I haven't seen the letters. Isn't that considered a federal crime since it's fraud via the US Postal Service?
They're 'offering IRS guidance' or from the 'department of taxation'
Having talked to many people I do believe there is low tax compliance, but having read how the IRS rationalized the Coinbase subpoena to the judge I realize they have no idea to tell if they have compliance or not. They merely did a search string for 2015 for "bitcoin" in tax filings and found 800 people filed that way. So I checked my 2015 tax filings and saw I had manually entered "LTC" for closing a litecoin trade…
"Coinbase doesn't know what any of the holdings or transactions represent" I had a KYC interview with Coinbase wondering where my coins came from. (I mined them in the 2009 to 2010 era when they were worthless, mined before the famous 10000 bitcoin pizza delivery, LOL). So they have a statement from me, which is probably now on file with the IRS. Now here's a puzzler... I got my 6174-A and so I verified my coinbase r…
The IRS enforcement division is a disproportionately large but small part of what the IRS does.
The other parts basically extend privileges to you. like when you do 475 elections, or 83(b) elections, or 501(c)3 elections etc etc. Basically all the cool stuff that makes you not have to pay taxes and only comes up if you run for office.
The enforcement division can be overzealous and ruin their own cases just from always thinking they have a smoking gun. If you reported and paid them you'll be fine.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Basically, these all say the same thing and aren't _that_ scary aside from the fact they are from the IRS: Amend your prior returns if you owe money. I am curious if they expect the same if you lost money.
IANAL, I'm not a tax expert, but I believe you can deduct losses when converting to/from fiat currency (US dollars). Which is where taxation would take effect. If you invested $10k in crypto mining equipment, you can deduct that investment (over 5 years or something similar), you then successfully mine 5 coins. These coins are/were worth whatever exchange rate you could get. Until you use/exchange them, you aren't ta…
If you mine any coins, that is income you have to pay taxes on. Just like when my RSU stocks vest, I pay (regular income) taxes on the vested amount. It's treated as if my company gave me the money to buy these stocks I now have. Later when I sell them, I'll pay capital gains tax on the gain/loss.
Now if I buy coins, then I will only be taxed on them when I sell them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Massive social engineering mean the IRS would need every financial and legal transaction you've ever participated in. Which they clearly do not. For example, we don't have a simple tax system based on a percentage of salary. The amount they want as a tax depends on your marital status, how many kids, how much your spouse earns, and if you itemize deductions it gets even worse WRT every medical provider's bill you've…
It's not just a matter of the paperwork being too burdensome; free coffees at church are simply not income. Neither is $20 in a birthday card from your grandma. Of course, there are grey areas where it's much harder to draw the line, but it's wrong to suggest that the IRS would tax every transaction if it could.
The $20 gift from grandma is exempt, but not because they don't demand insight into intra-family transfers.. it's only non-taxable because of its size. If you have a rich grandma and she gives you $20k, that needs to be reported.. even if no tax is ultimately due, it probably reduces the future value of her estate tax exemption. Dying is a very complex taxable event!
If you want to follow the thousands of pages of rules to the letter - sufficient to sign a letter declaring under penalty of purjury, etc - the tracking and compliance burden on many US taxpayers is enormous, even with assistance from the commercial closed-source SW packages that you are more or less forced into buying each year because they won't let you e-file with them directly over HTTPS+JSON or whatever.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well a lot of people are treating cryptocurrencies as speculative assets. ICOs wouldn't have been such a big thing if people didn't do that. So why shouldn't the IRS do the same?
The ICO market crashed and trading volume on crypto exchanges keeps dipping lower and lower and lower. Its main use-case has shifted back to currency after a failed bid as a security.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is not different. Coincidentally, I was the engineer at Zenpayroll (now Gusto) who was working on enabling employees to be paid in crypto back in 2013/2014. We never got to the implementation phase because of precisely this scenario. Bitcoin is so volatile that it's a very scary way to be paid. The downside risk (you can't pay rent because bitcoin did something weird that week) is really really bad for users and…
What about setting up partial compensation on a sliding scale? If my rent+bills+other fixed expenses is X% of my income, I could just take as much as cash as will pay for that and take out the rest of the 1-X% in crypto That said, unless there are tax implications of paying/getting paid in BTC that cause you to e.g. not realize gains, it's really no different than just paying the employee in all cash and letting them…
I'm not sure the option to be paid in numerous currencies concurrently is a big feature for payroll.
To highlight how nuts this could be: I travel to India every year, and I always carry with me a few hundred USD worth of rupees (the local currency). It would be insane for me to try and track the value of the rupees (in USD) for every time I bought something, and calculate the deltas between that and what I originally gave to the money changer. It is completely impractical to do that, and while I'm not an accountant…
This is similar to income-shaped small transfers of money within families; there would be Congressional hearings if the IRS found a deficiency in mandatory withholding taxes on babysitting money, which is unambiguously earned income of a statutory employee.