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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

#231

Post by godelski »

spiralx wrote: post #229
godelski wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Without riders and earmarks there's no way to get someone to support your bill if they don't like the concept to start with. There's no downside for not supporting a bill, so cutting half of its provisions will still half to vote against. Riders and earmarks allow politicians to secure minor wins that they can sell to their electorate as the reason for supporting a bill. And most of these things would simply never pa…

> Without riders and earmarks there's no way to get someone to support your bill if they don't like the concept to start with.

Why is this a problem? I see it as easier to call out politicians in public. Prevent the problems that are essentially: "Despite the 'Puppy and Sunshine' bill actually providing everyone with puppies and sunshine, we can't support it because it also summons the literal anti-christ to destroy the Earth. The puppies and sunshine is simply a trick to summon the anti-christ."

IMO doing so makes the bill far more transparent _to the public_.

> Riders and earmarks allow politicians to secure minor wins that they can sell to their electorate as the reason for supporting a bill.

I do not understand why such a thing could not happen without these nor with packages (as defined above).

> And most of these things would simply never pass as standalone bills

Do you not see that as a problem?

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

#232

Post by [deleted] »

arcticbull wrote: post #206
IfOnlyYouKnew wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Either transaction costs go up, or electricity usage per transaction goes down. Anything else just doesn’t add up.

Most coiners conveniently ignore block reward when calculating the cost of a transaction - that's your missing factor. Consider that the only reason you need to secure the blockchain is because it is mutable, if it were immutable it would be sufficient to simply publish it with a known hash. Ergo, 100% of the energy consumption of the Bitcoin network is attributable to transaction processing and therefore can be quan…

[deleted]

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

#233

Post by girishso »

drcode wrote: post #4

It seems rather unprecedented that there are currently US citizens who are billionaires because of their crypto holdings, without the government having any insight into precisely who these people are. It seems like eventually the government is going to push for more onerous reporting laws to return to the usual equilibrium, where the government has at least some basic idea regarding who owns what (which I think they…

Crypto experts are predicting insane valuations for BTC, at the same time USD value will drop (rather people will lose confidence in USD).

What I fear is, will Uncle Sam just let the USD go down the drain and watch doing nothing?

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

#234

Post by nootropicat »

vmception wrote: post #24
ilaksh wrote: post #17

I have heard that they are aiming to make an exception for Bitcoin only but try to stop everything else. That would be a really horrible outcome because Bitcoin is by far the most outdated and least useful cryptocurrency.

nobody is trying to make an exception for just bitcoin, they are trying to fix it for the whole class of crypto and broader digital payments

The new amendment does exactly that. He had good info.

https://www.coindesk.com/senator-who-wrote-controversial-cry...

Really evil to explicitly promote proof of work.

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

#235

Post by vmception »

nootropicat wrote: post #234
vmception wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

nobody is trying to make an exception for just bitcoin, they are trying to fix it for the whole class of crypto and broader digital payments

The new amendment does exactly that. He had good info. https://www.coindesk.com/senator-who-wrote-controversial-cry... Really evil to explicitly promote proof of work.

Dogecoin is proof of work, so is Litecoin, and Monero, and Ethereum Classic and....

still should be more inclusive to validators, delegates, stakers and others, thats a separate discussion

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

#236

Post by blurbleblurble »

kelnos wrote: post #115
dougSF70 wrote: post #2

Obviously HN community is down on crypto. This exemption is a sign that Bitcoin is getting closer to the mainstream of finance. Like most flanker-moves, Governments should be incorporating it in to their tax policies rather than shunning it. Cannabis is a good proxy, states can keep it illegal and not make tax revenue or they can legalize it, control it and tax it. The feds should do the same. Same for crypto, keepin…

I'm confused about your position on this, though: the amendment in question ensures certain cryptocurrency-related activities won't be taxed. I agree that we shouldn't be banning this sort of thing, but if people want to throw electricity at it in ways that I consider a huge waste of resources, I'd really like to see that taxed better. And not in a regressive way that makes every electricity user pay more. > Obviousl…

No no no, the amendment doesn't say that those activities can't be taxed, it clarifies that there won't be KYC requirements on people who literally can't comply with them.

The issue here isn't about what activities should be taxed, it's about overly broad KYC reporting requirements.

Pretend the original provision was about ATMs... the language could be used to argue that armored truck drivers should be required to collect personal information and transaction data for every user of every ATM they deliver cash to. Obviously that's not really possible and would be a huge privacy issue. The risk people are seeing here is that the current language could be abused to make ATMs illegal altogether, since nobody would want to risk getting in trouble during the process of stocking them.

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

#237

Post by sunshinerag »

arcticbull wrote: post #228
sunshinerag wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a more efficient system to arrive at consensus of a state in a distributed, trust-less, permission less manner?

Well there's proof of stake. However, whether alternatives exist or not has no bearing on the efficiency of a system.

well it does matter. you can't use the words "less efficient" or "more efficient" if there are no alternatives with similar properties.

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

#238

Post by arcticbull »

sunshinerag wrote: post #237
arcticbull wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well there's proof of stake. However, whether alternatives exist or not has no bearing on the efficiency of a system.

well it does matter. you can't use the words "less efficient" or "more efficient" if there are no alternatives with similar properties.

Thermal efficiency is an absolute - units of energy expended vs work achieved. There is an alternative: proof of stake. Or removing certain constraints on the problem space. A different approach to solving the problem is absolutely an alternative. Visa is an alternative. The extant banking system is an alternative.

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

#239

Post by mikeblackson »

arcticbull wrote: post #206
IfOnlyYouKnew wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Either transaction costs go up, or electricity usage per transaction goes down. Anything else just doesn’t add up.

Most coiners conveniently ignore block reward when calculating the cost of a transaction - that's your missing factor. Consider that the only reason you need to secure the blockchain is because it is mutable, if it were immutable it would be sufficient to simply publish it with a known hash. Ergo, 100% of the energy consumption of the Bitcoin network is attributable to transaction processing and therefore can be quan…

You can do 1+ million lightning network transactions that will settle as 1 transaction on the BTC blockchain, so ~$93/1,000,000? Sounds amazingly cheap for uncensorable transactions.

ESG people are trying to solve something that is already solved. POW is here to stay and will scale tremendously well as we all move to layer 2.

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

#240

Post by mikeblackson »

arcticbull wrote: post #238
sunshinerag wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

well it does matter. you can't use the words "less efficient" or "more efficient" if there are no alternatives with similar properties.

Thermal efficiency is an absolute - units of energy expended vs work achieved. There is an alternative: proof of stake. Or removing certain constraints on the problem space. A different approach to solving the problem is absolutely an alternative. Visa is an alternative. The extant banking system is an alternative.

You can't say how efficient it is without calculating how layer 2 scaling affects per transaction energy usage. You can do millions of layer 2 transactions that eventually settle as 1 transaction on the main chain.
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