IRS sends warning letters to more than 10k cryptocurrency holders

Well, there aren't many sellers which try to directly sue their allegedly cheating customers. It's almost never worth it. Platforms might be able to make that work, but they don't do that either. IMHO, the desire for buyer info is not motivated by trying to hedge against customer fraud but on trying to monetize everything - selling data, advertising to existing customers since they're more likely to buy v2 of what they bought, etc.

Giving less of my info to sellers is therefore less a technological characteristic of a payment system, and more a choice by the system's creators. There's no technological hurdle to even having a credit card which gives a bit less info. Theoretically, the credit company only needs to see my expense, current available funds and some transaction/merchant identifier, not exactly what I spend it on or even who I am.

I'm hoping some of the new NFC-based payment systems will make privacy a differentiator. They'll need something if they want to get into the market with such established players. We'll see what Apple comes along with. I've been slagging them quite a bit, but they do try to make privacy a selling point. Perhaps here too?

As for the second issue, I am sure that a form of chargeback could be implemented on top of crypto. Your first link just shows one way to do it - but doesn't link to any implementations of this. The second link explicitly mentions 'no chargebacks', so again, it's theoretical in the sense of not existing.

The hurdle here is again not technological, but the apparently inability of the crypto community to think that people might want this behaviour. Sometimes even sellers. Where I live, allowing return of unused goods before a certain period of time has passed is mandated by law. Payment methods which does not have chargeback may actually complicate seller's business in this case, since than they have to be even more careful against internal fraud and pay an extra fee for the return as if it were a new transfer (if not in cash).

Thirdly, fraud and ransomware are getting worse and worse. I'm sure eventually there'll a crackdown. I just can't predict how, where and when. But crypto would be a very convenient target politically; this doesn't yet require targeting any large stakeholder.

Alas, the one thing the crypto community is right about, is that many economists are just waiting to be able to implement negative interest rates - but I doubt crypto would be able to change anything there.

That's just it. They require you to say how much it was worth when you got it.

But they really have no way to know whether you are lying. As a result, people lie about the value of traded goods, or art, or land properties, or unlisted financial instruments, to reduce the amount of income tax they purportedly owe. This is a major tax-evasion (not avoiding) and/or money-laundering loophole employed by the rich, especially when employing art and real estate, which may be justifiably non-comparable to similar goods due to uniqueness.

A law-obeying person would liquidate enough of the subjective-value goods to pay income tax at the maximum withholding rate at the time of receipt, and send that amount to the IRS at the end of the quarter, then claiming a refund from that amount with their return at the end of the year.

A practical, law-breaking person would just keep their mouth shut about it, and allow the IRS to claim it was income that had value, and only pay taxes on it (or dispute the amount demanded) if the IRS actually demanded an amount.

The enforcement on Bitcoin-holders is not to raise revenue in any meaningful sense. It is to discourage use of cryptocurrencies as a means of tax evasion--probably because middle-class people could make use of it. With respect to the means employed by the rich to evade and avoid taxes, an equivalent effort would likely return 1000 times greater rewards.

If somebody has designed a digital system to throw away data instead of recording it, that doesn't excuse them from recording it when needed for tax reasons.

And I understand that in cryptocurrency land there's always a future thing that people will use. Wake me when that happens, as 10 years in I've stopped holding my breath. Especially since, as I said upthread, other technologies in the same period have found widespread adoption.