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IRS sends warning letters to more than 10k cryptocurrency holders

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Re: IRS sends warning letters to more than 10k cryptocurrency holders

#401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is so overkill. What if I am just moving and reporting my new address? What if I am 20 years old and never had any income?

Why do you have to report a new address when you move? To whom?

The DMV, IRS, DSS, USPS etc etc.

Here's a guide:

https://www.moving.com/tips/change-address-checklist-who-to-...

Re: IRS sends warning letters to more than 10k cryptocurrency holders

#402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think people who trade foreign money as an investment strategy realize this.

Probably, yes. But everyone else is still subject to this law. For example the UK pound may or may not go down in value in case of hard brexit, if a brit had some euros stashed and the pound crashed, they would have to pay capital gains when exchanging their euros back into pounds.

Unless the total value is under £6000. Important to make sure not everyone panics about the €500 they brought back from their holiday :)

Re: IRS sends warning letters to more than 10k cryptocurrency holders

#403
post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you have to report a new address when you move? To whom?

The DMV, IRS, DSS, USPS etc etc. Here's a guide: https://www.moving.com/tips/change-address-checklist-who-to-...

I interpreted it as HAVE to report, given the context of police asking you for information rather than the other way around, which seemed like a very fascist requirement.

Re: IRS sends warning letters to more than 10k cryptocurrency holders

#404
post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lies have to be knowing and wilful [1]. It shouldn't be easy to knowingly and wilfully lie about something when you don't understand all the facts, implications and details. Did you have a example in mind of someone who had been wrongfully convicted of this offence due to an innocent mistake? [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Making_false_statements

Many, many situations of "lying to investigators" has been claimed to be an innocent mistake. No telling how many really were as it's 100% a judgement call of the investigators. Until you've sat across from a pair of investigators, it's hard to guess how you'll respond to relatively simple questions. I've run mock interview sessions for these and it's incredibly easy to trip someone up once you get them angry or get…

It's not a judgment call of the investigators, it's a crime that you can plead not guilty to. I think the burden is on you to provide an example of someone who was actually convicted of this crime despite not having "knowingly and wilfully" lied.

Re: IRS sends warning letters to more than 10k cryptocurrency holders

#405
post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many, many situations of "lying to investigators" has been claimed to be an innocent mistake. No telling how many really were as it's 100% a judgement call of the investigators. Until you've sat across from a pair of investigators, it's hard to guess how you'll respond to relatively simple questions. I've run mock interview sessions for these and it's incredibly easy to trip someone up once you get them angry or get…

It's not a judgment call of the investigators, it's a crime that you can plead not guilty to. I think the burden is on you to provide an example of someone who was actually convicted of this crime despite not having "knowingly and wilfully" lied.

Investigators - at least with the FBI, where I am familiar - don't record and are often discouraged from recording interviews. They take notes in the moment or summarize based on their memory some time after. Therefore what you said and how you meant it have gone through at least one interpretation before it makes it into any official record. And the interviewer is often not going to be the lead investigator on the case, adding another interpretation.

And that's assuming everyone is doing their best to give a complete and accurate statement+summary minimizing their own biases.

When it comes down to "knowingly and willfully" it is often a judgement call.

This is well-established legal understanding. Please read up on 302s:

https://steemit.com/informationwar/@stevescoins/what-is-an-f...

Re: IRS sends warning letters to more than 10k cryptocurrency holders

#406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just foolishness. Are some rich people still exploiting others and rigging the system? Sure. But chattel slavery was an extraordinary evil. It's at best vacuous to put it in the same moral bucket as a democracy where people vote to, say, make sure old people don't starve in the streets.

USA was a democracy also before Abraham Lincoln. Voting to take 50% of regular Joe's income does not make it right, like voting to kill Joe or voting anything that affects Joe, no matter how nice is the "cause" used as an excuse.

I understand your own quirky morality, but when you live in a society with other people, you'll have to find common ground.

I'll note that "50% of regular Joe's income" has an enormous number of hidden assumptions, all of them similarly socially negotiated. So the theoretical purity of your position is mainly an illusion.

Re: IRS sends warning letters to more than 10k cryptocurrency holders

#407
post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just foolishness. Are some rich people still exploiting others and rigging the system? Sure. But chattel slavery was an extraordinary evil. It's at best vacuous to put it in the same moral bucket as a democracy where people vote to, say, make sure old people don't starve in the streets.

> people vote The "high taxation is not slavery, because you voted" argument lost all merit once net recipients of the welfare state became able to out-vote its net contributors - which has already happened in the US. > make sure old people don't starve If only that were what the extent of what social security actually does. But it's not properly asset tested. So broke millenials are paying a ton of payroll taxes, wh…

One, your numbers for "already happened in the US" are at best erroneous. The question of who gets what from labor is complicated, but the one thing for sure is that there are no easy answers, because labor itself is deeply social.

Re: IRS sends warning letters to more than 10k cryptocurrency holders

#408
post #233
post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't mind less power in exchange for not having to give up so much of my information to merchants. As someone who's sold things before I also like that bitcoin presents a tradeoff on prevalence of buyer fraud vs. seller fraud, and that if I want more power as a consumer I can opt-in to various escrow or risk-absorbing systems rather than rely on buyer-side-bias in charge disputes as a poor man's escrow. It's not o…

* There's no need for a tradeoff. We could just have a method of payment that gives less of your information to merchants. * You can't 'opt-in' to 'various escrow or risk-absorbing systems'. That's because these services simply do not exist at this moment at Bitcoin-land. They may well never exist or be supported by merchants. You're comparing a non-existing theoretical model against real-world working stuff. * Unfor…

A bit late, but for your first point, what methods do you propose? The existing ones aren't good enough, with every merchant wanting to know as much as they can about you. In person of course cash works fine, and long ago I've mailed money orders, but neither is feasible for online. I'm glad PayPal exists and use it for some things, but of course PayPal knows all about me (I've even used their credit system before) and downstream merchants get bits of that + whatever else they require besides the money and a shipping address. (Like a phone number, though few ever try to verify them it's not an unreasonable step to try and cut down on buyer fraud. Seriously buyer fraud is huge, lots of dishonest people will buy something on ebay or wherever and then claim it never showed up, or the wrong item was received, or it was damaged, or.. all possibly perfectly normal issues that exist to help combat seller fraud, but the current tradeoff for disputes is so heavily stacked in favor of the buyer with the current systems that many times the seller can do nothing about a lying buyer except try not to deal with them again and/or require more information from the next person.)

Ultimately it boils down to, without comment on the desirability of making it possible to purchase illegal goods, can your proposals match the low amount of information darknet markets require along with the low amount of friction in making a payment? (A shipping address for physical items is the maximal information needed by any party in that whole system.)

For your second point, you can opt-in. Basic escrow has existed since the beginning with m-of-n signature transactions, various wallets have UIs for it. I'll just leave this here: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Multisignature For "risk-absorbing systems" for merchants, those too have been around. BitPay is probably still the most popular, and it's several years old now. https://bitpay.com/ If you as a merchant use them, you can if you want not even bother dealing with BTC and its inherent risks at all but still accept it as a payment method.

For your third point I agree (elder)¹ fraud is a problem, and that if the scammers extract payment with a CC there's at least a chance of getting some money back... but that's not the only way they extract payment. Even if you made CCs magical anti-fraud devices, there would still be unacceptably high amounts of fraud targeting these types of people, because fraud is a complex problem and the institutions most capable of addressing it systematically would rather live with its predictable costs. As such I don't think adding BTC to the mix would harm things (or help things as a BTC fanatic might try and argue) by a noticeable amount in this area.

Admittedly I'm not too confident on this when applied to fraud more broadly; specifically I'm thinking of the new ransomware threat model people have had to contend with in the last few years. Overwhelmingly those attacks (not just against elders, but industrial infrastructure and so forth!) extract payment with cryptocurrencies, though sometimes they accept gift cards etc. Restricted to the elderly, more traditional computer related schemes like "coerce a phone call to a number for 'technical support' and get victim to grant remote access to their computer, 'discover' malware, have victim pay for 'fixing' it via CC/gift card/bank wire..." are still probably going to be the most common. And of course as I wrote above, by having a payment mechanism that shifts the tradeoff in fraud disputes back to the seller, we might see an increase in seller fraud, but how will that compare to the decrease in buyer fraud?

¹A not so elder relative got tricked out of $120 not too long ago, which for him is a significant chunk of change. Fraud is a multi-spectrum problem and in many respects only seems to be getting worse over time.

Re: IRS sends warning letters to more than 10k cryptocurrency holders

#409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1 USD always equals 1 USD and you pay taxes on gains relative to the USD as a US person. It's not possible for your USD to be an appreciating asset relative to the USD and that's how capital gains are defined. However, if you go to a store in America (and hypothetically) they give you change in Euros, then you take that to another store, and redeem the Euros there, you do in fact owe taxes on the increase in value of…

At one point in time and at one location. At different places in the US, 1 USD can purchase more or less. So on the internet, the purchasing power of the dollar is fairly nebulous. So, I agree, but with more nitpickiness.

Again, you don't pay taxes in terms of purchasing power.

You pay taxes in terms of USD.

Re: IRS sends warning letters to more than 10k cryptocurrency holders

#410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is true for any foreign currency, and it's exactly why a country tends to converge on exactly one currency, even when it's illegal. Dealing with multiple currencies on a daily basis is a giant pain in the ass. Europe is an instructive example here. Most of a continent was sick enough of the hassle that they eliminated 19 currencies in favor of the Euro [1] Another good example is Ecuador. In the 1980s, both curr…

No, this is not the case. For foreign currency there is a low-value transaction exemption. If you go on vacation in Italy you don’t have to report forex income/loss for every meal. But if you came back with an Italian sports car, you would. Not so with bitcoin, which the IRS taxes every transaction, no matter how small.

I think the reasonable justification for the low-value exemption for foreign currencies is that it's a) a common consumer use case, and b) hard to account for. Neither applies to Bitcoin. Not only is Bitcoin a failure for typical consumer use [1], but its digital-from-the-start nature means that the accounting burden is much lower.

[1] https://avc.com/2017/08/store-of-value-vs-payment-system/

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