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Senators move to exempt Bitcoin, crypto miners from proposed U.S. tax rules

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Re: Senators move to exempt Bitcoin, crypto miners from proposed U.S. tax rules

#181

What counts here as a digital asset? World of Warcraft coins? Steam collectible cards?

Sounds like it is a defined term: https://www.rpc.senate.gov/legislative-notices/hr-3684_infra...

Good source.

"Additionally, the provision clarifies that the definition of specified security includes a digital asset, which is defined as any digital representation of value that is recorded on a cryptographically secured distributed ledger or any similar technology."

That means that WoW coins don't count (but NFTs do).

Re: Senators move to exempt Bitcoin, crypto miners from proposed U.S. tax rules

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But think about it: a _singular_ person in your mixing pool can make the entire pool illegal. One, singular, person using that money for contraband (illegal porn, illegal drugs, illegal tax evasion) will turn the entire pool illegal. It's very difficult to know, but I'm leaning towards this not holding up in court. At least not upon appeal. If a mixer has tens of millions of known participant addresses and the gover…

At least given today's political environment, I can very well see a simple argument consisting of: * "The only reason to use a mixer is to hide money" * "You joined a pool of millions of individuals, all of whom had the explicit goal of hiding money from the traditional financial system". * "You (probably) knew that the money you get in your output wallet comes from a random individual in the pool". As such, the impl…

You're worried about the distraction and inconvenience of a trial court case, me and the person you replied to are confident in the appeals courts - where there is no jury to appeal to the emotion of but where the arguments are much more constitutional and procedural based.

Re: Senators move to exempt Bitcoin, crypto miners from proposed U.S. tax rules

#183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you described is not illegal by itself. Obfuscating the origin of earnings is not illegal. Although "pooling" may be regulated in other ways. A federal "money laundering" charge requires an illicit origin, and so since successful money laundering will never have an illicit origin, the charge can only be tacked on to another indictment. After centuries of not having much surveillance tools of the money supply, th…

> A federal "money laundering" charge requires an illicit origin, and so since successful money laundering will never have an illicit origin, the charge can only be tacked on to another indictment. Fair. But think about it: a _singular_ person in your mixing pool can make the entire pool illegal. One, singular, person using that money for contraband (illegal porn, illegal drugs, illegal tax evasion) will turn the ent…

I had not chimed in on mixers, only money laundering charges. There are plenty of other ways to obfuscate the origin of crypto without using mixers.

Although I don't agree with how you extrapolate other legal scenarios to one about mixer users, I'm also not worried about juries, the judges especially on appeal are where your rights matter and would not be swayed by emotional arguments like a jury. You are pretty much paralyzed if you are always worried about what prosecutors can target you for and what juries can be swayed to do.

Re: Senators move to exempt Bitcoin, crypto miners from proposed U.S. tax rules

#184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But think about it: a _singular_ person in your mixing pool can make the entire pool illegal. One, singular, person using that money for contraband (illegal porn, illegal drugs, illegal tax evasion) will turn the entire pool illegal. It's very difficult to know, but I'm leaning towards this not holding up in court. At least not upon appeal. If a mixer has tens of millions of known participant addresses and the gover…

At least given today's political environment, I can very well see a simple argument consisting of: * "The only reason to use a mixer is to hide money" * "You joined a pool of millions of individuals, all of whom had the explicit goal of hiding money from the traditional financial system". * "You (probably) knew that the money you get in your output wallet comes from a random individual in the pool". As such, the impl…

>As such, the implicit assumption in a reasonable person's mind is: this money you got is absolutely from someone else who was trying to hide their money. The law also states that aiding and abetting them is illegal in of itself.

Is hiding money inherently a crime, though? I think it only might be if you're trying to violate a specific law regarding transparency. Naturally, if you're using a mixer, you must be trying to hide your money or how you're using the money, so if that much is illegal then you can skip all the arguments about the source of the other funds in the mixer. But if it isn't illegal, then I think you might need to tie it to belief that a specific crime likely occurred.

I'm definitely not a lawyer and could be totally wrong. But that's the defense I'd give, at least. Unless mixers are explicitly declared illegal, or unless there are explicit reporting requirements which you're evading (e.g. they have reason to believe that you used the mixer to evade taxes), the accusation just seems too weak and vague.

>Well, the issue with "faster moving" mixers is that it more closely connects the dirty money with the source. "Slow moving" mixers with larger pools are more entangled, harder to know where the money came from.

That's true. The better the mixer, the harder it might be to prove you aren't guilty if you're not guilty. But, at the same time, the harder it might be to prove you are guilty if you actually are guilty. (Assuming the crime in question is what the mixing was allegedly abetting, like a cryptocurrency exchange heist or something.)

>I dunno. The RAII has been mildly successful in court over IP addresses used in Bittorrent peers, right? That seems to be roughly the same level of involvement as we're seeing here. I'm not necessarily saying you're going to get jailtime, but you probably will be roped into the court case if someone in your pool was doing something sketchy.

That seems very different to me. The inherent act of downloading or uploading the content is illegal. So if an IP registered to your name and home address is downloading the content, then it's just a matter of trying to prove that you likely initiated that activity. The IP's "guilt" is already a given.

I think it'd only be analogous if mere use of a mixer is also itself illegal; even assuming a scenario where no one is using it to help with any other crimes. But if it is, then it's just begging the question, since using it would be illegal because it's illegal to use. And then it'd just be a matter of proving you had access to and were using that cryptocurrency address at that time, since the address's "guilt" is already established.

Re: Senators move to exempt Bitcoin, crypto miners from proposed U.S. tax rules

#185
post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A proper CO2 tax wouldn't be disruptive to bitcoin, bitcoin only cares that everyone pays the same price for electricity. If the absolute cost of electricity goes up, nothing changes.

The cost of electricity (coupled with the rewards and cost of hardware) changes how profitable mining is. The more profitable the more players. The more players the more transaction throughput. This is exactly why miners have bought powerplants and why they operate in locations with cheap electricity, because it makes it more profitable for them. Bitcoin mining is directly related to the cost of electricity. That sai…

It's the same transaction throughput regardless of the number of miners.

Re: Senators move to exempt Bitcoin, crypto miners from proposed U.S. tax rules

#186
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess we need a proper CO2 tax to encourage better technology than proof of work

The math on the PoW energy FUD just doesn't check out. - At current levels, bitcoin uses very roughly 0.1% of global electricity but electricity only represents 25% of fossil fuels emissions so current PoW contribution to global emissions = 0.025%, ie a rounding error. This issue is currently a total red herring. Now let's project into the future. - bitcoin total addressable market cap if it took over the entire glob…

> And it's heavily skewed towards tapping into that exclusively as that's the cheapest source and PoW is location neutral.

Are there any big miners who are known to be using stranded/wasted energy that would be produced anyway, as opposed to operating stranded plants that would otherwise be shut down or have capacity reduced? I only really follow the publicly traded miners (and with a bearish thesis), and I've seen a lot of miners getting dedicated coal/natural gas capacity but very little in terms of recapturing wasted energy.

And these are (mostly) US-based public companies, so they have the most to gain by projecting an ESG image.

Re: Senators move to exempt Bitcoin, crypto miners from proposed U.S. tax rules

#187
post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also note that this crypto tax-reporting provision was slid into a huge bipartisan infrastructure deal. It really never should have been included in this legislation in the first place. Exempting actors in the crypto space who facillitate crypto usage without ever having custodial control of the funds makes a lot of sense. (Just like envelope manufacturers shouldn't have to register as money transmitters because peop…

> this crypto tax provision was slid into a huge bipartisan infrastructure deal. It really never should have been included in this legislation in the first place. Why not? The infrastructure is being paid for in part by this tax. They're fundamentally linked.

I think a lot of people, myself included, would like bills to be hyper focused and ban the use of riders.

There are a few reasons for this. One is that it is easier to keep track from the public perspective. A title should reflect the contents of the bill (in this case it is not obvious that bitcoin regulations are part of infrastructure). This could help reduce confusion and manipulation. It helps with transparency because it reduces the cognitive load (Note we can still talk about a "plan" or "package" that is a group of bills and so many conversations would stay the same).

The second part is that it helps reduce squabbling over nuance. A current bill might be 99% agreeable but that 1% is pretty contentious. If it was more compartmentalized then we could pass 99% of those things and get them in place faster rather than throwing the entire thing in the trash and restructuring (which often links back to the first point). This also reduces some of the toxic nature in politics where sometimes politicians add a component to nuke their own proposals so they can complain about it to their party's constituents.

This can probably be improved upon a lot but I think highlights the frustration with how things are done today and people are looking for systematic changes to fix those problems.

Re: Senators move to exempt Bitcoin, crypto miners from proposed U.S. tax rules

#188
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So why are ransomware hackers never prosecuted?

> So why are ransomware hackers never prosecuted? Because they're typically based in Russia, and Russia has a policy that it will not prosecute its citizens for computer crimes unless they perpetrated them against Russians or Russian organizations. My understanding is most ransomware has code to detect Russian computers (e.g. by checking localization settings), and will refuse to run if it finds itself on one for tha…

Why not set all US system to have russian locale?

Re: Senators move to exempt Bitcoin, crypto miners from proposed U.S. tax rules

#189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The math on the PoW energy FUD just doesn't check out. - At current levels, bitcoin uses very roughly 0.1% of global electricity but electricity only represents 25% of fossil fuels emissions so current PoW contribution to global emissions = 0.025%, ie a rounding error. This issue is currently a total red herring. Now let's project into the future. - bitcoin total addressable market cap if it took over the entire glob…

>At current levels, bitcoin uses very roughly 0.1% of global electricity but electricity only represents 25% of fossil fuels emissions so current PoW contribution to global emissions = 0.025%, ie a rounding error. How does this argument make sense? Let's split up the world's energy consumption into 0.025% emission sized chunks in some arbitrary way we choose. Does nothing then make any difference, since everything is…

I see your point but my first bit just meant to highlight the unfair disproportionate energy attention PoW has been getting specifically vs just about any other use case.

I don't personally think you should be making moral judgements about energy use though. Let the market decide what's a good use of energy. If you have a carbon problem, tax / regulate that, PoW won't care. It will adjust through difficulty adjustments.

But if you are worried about PoW boiling the oceans if left unchecked, the numbers should comfort you it's at worst going to tap mostly into wasted energy / mostly renewable and probably not have a noticeable impact even extrapolated to a peak outcome (and probably even be a net positive).

Re: Senators move to exempt Bitcoin, crypto miners from proposed U.S. tax rules

#190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least given today's political environment, I can very well see a simple argument consisting of: * "The only reason to use a mixer is to hide money" * "You joined a pool of millions of individuals, all of whom had the explicit goal of hiding money from the traditional financial system". * "You (probably) knew that the money you get in your output wallet comes from a random individual in the pool". As such, the impl…

>As such, the implicit assumption in a reasonable person's mind is: this money you got is absolutely from someone else who was trying to hide their money. The law also states that aiding and abetting them is illegal in of itself. Is hiding money inherently a crime, though? I think it only might be if you're trying to violate a specific law regarding transparency. Naturally, if you're using a mixer, you must be trying…

I too am not a lawyer. But banks and money transactions have numerous provisions in them to hamper criminals who try to hide money.

Perhaps I'm wrong about money laundering. But what if prosecutors instead hit you with smurfing? (https://www.goldinglawyers.com/smurfing-money-example-lost-e...)

Perhaps smurfing is closer to the mixing. The _intent to hide_ is by itself illegal in the law, and frowned upon severely in our country.

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