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Crypto investors face tax crackdown as 70% non-compliant

thepost.co.nz

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Re: Crypto investors face tax crackdown as 70% non-compliant

#3
> However, gains made from trading assets, including property, were taxed, and that caught crypto investors as the dominant reason for buying crypto assets is to later sell make a gain, rather than holding them as a long term asset like a home, or rental property.

Unfortunately what constitutes “trading” vs “holding” is ill defined in NZ law. At least with shares you can make a case you’re holding them for dividends, that defence isn’t available for crypto.

Re: Crypto investors face tax crackdown as 70% non-compliant

#9
post #5

Article seems to suggest if you make gains but lost them later you still need to pay tax on the gain?! That's strange..

No it doesn't.

It indicates that when you switch your investment from one thing to another, that you have to then pay tax for your gain.

Which is very very normal.

Just that people in crypto not realized what it means when you trade bitcoin to another token which would be the equivielent of selling shares and buying something else like gold. As soon as you sell your shares you have to pay tax on gains.

But hey, the advantage of crypto was anyway that its an 'unregulated' market. Lets hope at least bitcoin just dies

Re: Crypto investors face tax crackdown as 70% non-compliant

#10
post #5

Article seems to suggest if you make gains but lost them later you still need to pay tax on the gain?! That's strange..

It happens when you exchange one type of token for another, that's the point being made. Broadly: the gain is calculated any time the value of the property is realised by using it to purchase some other thing. Using the thing to purchase money is one way of realising its value, and makes the calculations easy; but when used to purchase some thing other than money, the transaction can be assigned a monetary value and that's used to calculate the gain or loss.

The example given of the guy that had NZ$1.6m - the tax became due when he sold his NZ$1.6m of tokens for what we must assume was NZ$1.6m of some other type of token. He should have calculated the gain at that point, set aside an appropriate amount of money for to pay the tax bill later, and spent only the remainder on the other tokens.

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