191–200 of 317 posts
Does this mean MtGox users can claim capital loss when filing taxes now? How will users be able to prove that?
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Coinbase is not FDIC insured.
Neither is your computer or your safe. Coinbase is very likely much safer for the average consumer than anything they'd do themselves.
There are plenty of techniques for keeping your coins safe. Just find one and use it. I've heard Armory is pretty good.
Coinbase is far more dangerous in comparison, because they can go under at any time for any reason. Human greed is a thing. Always remember that Coinbase has to rely on some employees to implement their systems, and those same employees can write some code to steal money from their systems.
I don't see how this law could be enforceable. Hiding bitcoins from the IRS seems to be trivial and lying about the real acquisition value as well. This is very different from stocks where all trades are overseen by the SEC. You can't just go to a neighbor's house and pay for stock in cash without telling anybody else.
The same way cash transactions are trackable, which is to say they are not. In either event you can choose to evade the taxes but it's probably not a wise bet.
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Sounds like an absolute tax nightmare. In a pool you are awarded some small amount of coins every couple hours. Mine for a month, and you'll have hundreds or thousands of "bitcoin income" events, each with its own market price.
What's the nightmare there? You need a single simple report (excel sheet?) from the mining pool and just total them up. Hundreds or thousands of events is nothing special - if your income would come from selling stuff in a tiny shop, you'd likely have that many receipts to report.
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According the article this is not true. The tax event is turning the bitcoins into currency or spending them. So, the issue could be you have $1,000,000 of bitcoin, and you spend it. You now owe capital gains on the difference in price between when you bought and sold. Now, even if you have the $x00,000 in bitcoin to cover this, you better convert it fast (like simultaneously). Or, never spend bitcoin directly -- con…
Actually, it says that you are taxed on their value at the time they are mined.
Or can we use them to buy stuff, and avoid capital gains altogether?
Somebody in the Bitcoin ecosystem would get a lot of attention if they published an authoritative number for the average Bitcoin price in 2013, which would likely suffice for most taxpayers' needs for a reasonable and consistent valuation. (Ask a tax professional if you disbelieve that informal recommendation.) This is one of the many equally valid options for e.g. calculating the yen/USD conversion if you happen to…
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How so? These aren't new rules, just old rules that are newly applied to Bitcoin. As others have noted, this is how things work for employer issued stock. You only put yourself in danger if you are ignorant of the rules and don't take necessary precautions. If you are investing enough to open yourself up to a capital gains loss of more than $3000, you have no excuse to be ignorant. Tax tip from a non-lawyer/non-accou…
The fact that "it's always been that way" is no refutation of the fact that "it's a problem" that you could lose money and yet still owe taxes as if you had gains because capital losses (hysteretically) saturate at $3000.
This is money, not "do whatever you want".
This is exactly why we need to quit caring what the IRS, Fed, Treasury, Inland Revenue, etc. think of Bitcoin, and focus on it's use (along with Tor, tumblers, and other technologies) as an untraceable, anonymous crypto-currency that lets us avoid dealings with the IRS and agencies of their ilk.
Will this work against "mainstream" adoption of Bitcoin? Maybe. Who cares? Personally, I'm not interested in Bitcoin as yet another way to incur additional entanglements with corrupt, evil and bureaucratic government agencies.
Government is damage, and we, the hackers, should be working on ways to route around that damage.
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Coinbase is not FDIC insured.
Neither is your computer or your safe. Coinbase is very likely much safer for the average consumer than anything they'd do themselves.
Coinbase is probably better secured than that, but I wouldn't trust any Bitcoin bank at this point. Personal computers are bad too because of malware, but I'd say the average consumer would be considerably safer with a safe.