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The Future of Payments and Open Source Support

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Re: The Future of Payments and Open Source Support

#11

Post by Xylakant »

mike_hearn wrote: post #6
the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> author seems to believe he cannot accept tips, because of tax and regulation, but he doesn't point out what specifically would cause problems here. JFTR: "accepting tips" for software is something that is not at all straightforward. The way bountysource and others get around that is through invoices once a large enough amount has accumulated. I have no idea how that works in other countries. Gratipay/bountysource s…

Could you explain why accepting tips is so complicated? What specific law means you cannot do it? Let me put this another way. If your friends give you money for your birthday, do you give it back to them and tell them you can't accept their gift because of tax and regulation? I doubt it! You may well declare the gifts on your tax return if it's big enough to bother with, but if Austria makes it hard to accept cash g…

> Could you explain why accepting tips is so complicated? What specific law means you cannot do it?

I can't speak for the OP and the GP, but I can shed some light on this for which problems I could run into in germany:

* I own a company (GmbH, limited liability). Bookkeeping rules are fairly strict, I can't accept random money from random people without having an entry in a ledger. It's possible, but if it's single digits then it's probably more work than it's worth. I'd also have to figure out how to legally accept money from the US or whatever country this money comes from.

* I could accept the money as private person. Then I'd still have to keep books and add that to my private income. That probably would also be more work than the attached payoff.

* Not keeping books or declaring the donations may draw the scrutiny of the tax authorities. If you're accepting a lot of small cash gifts you might also run afoul of money laundering regulations.

> Let me put this another way. If your friends give you money for your birthday, do you give it back to them and tell them you can't accept their gift because of tax and regulation?

Gifts from friends and family are specifically exempt from income tax regulations, so you're attacking a strawman here.

Re: The Future of Payments and Open Source Support

#12

Post by the_mitsuhiko »

mike_hearn wrote: post #6
the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> author seems to believe he cannot accept tips, because of tax and regulation, but he doesn't point out what specifically would cause problems here. JFTR: "accepting tips" for software is something that is not at all straightforward. The way bountysource and others get around that is through invoices once a large enough amount has accumulated. I have no idea how that works in other countries. Gratipay/bountysource s…

Could you explain why accepting tips is so complicated? What specific law means you cannot do it? Let me put this another way. If your friends give you money for your birthday, do you give it back to them and tell them you can't accept their gift because of tax and regulation? I doubt it! You may well declare the gifts on your tax return if it's big enough to bother with, but if Austria makes it hard to accept cash g…

> Could you explain why accepting tips is so complicated? What specific law means you cannot do it?

If tips come in individually and in small numbers and you need to track the rate of exchange, origin and everything the money I lose money actively by needing to track it. There is no point in accepting small amounts.

The reason actual tips work in Austria is because they are tax except within a regulatory framework. That however does not apply to software developers.

> Let me put this another way. If your friends give you money for your birthday, do you give it back to them and tell them you can't accept their gift because of tax and regulation?

Actual gifts are a different tax code (they are tax free). I can however not just pretend that any of my income is the same. This is not a "but if i read the law like this" thing.

> but if Austria makes it hard to accept cash gifts of small amounts then something is seriously wrong with Austrian law and this is not something to be defended.

From what I have heard it's not in any way easier in other countries and it does not have to be because that was never the problem. The whole point of bountysource and other systems is to accumulate money and to simplify the whole process. It makes everything easier, even if taxes would not be concerned. It's what makes the whole tipping thing save and easy through a middleman.

Re: The Future of Payments and Open Source Support

#13

Post by pron »

mike_hearn wrote: post #3
wdewind wrote: post #2

TLDR; there are two problems with tip4commit: 1. The obvious, that they are collecting funds on behalf of other people's work and then keeping them when the funds go 'unclaimed' 2. Even if you do want to claim it, they don't make it easy, and for someone in a complicated tax country (like the author, Austria) there is almost no way he could accept the money without incurring some kind of risk. So basically when they…

I'm not sure it is. I'm not a huge fan of tip4commit either, I agree that it's opt-out model is bogus, but the fact that it uses Bitcoin seems irrelevant. The author seems to believe he cannot accept tips, because of tax and regulation, but he doesn't point out what specifically would cause problems here. Obviously people make and accept tips using euros all the time, this is not illegal, so why it would be different…

> So he has a generalised feeling that Bitcoin is bad because it's popular and has vocal fans, and that regulation is good yet also complicated, so anything which seems simple must be unregulated and therefore bad.

The only (or at least, the main) argument we ever hear in favor of Bitcoin is that it's unregulated, and therefore it's liked by people who dislike regulation. Why, then, is it surprising or illogical for someone to dislike Bitcoin because they're in favor of regulation? Being in favor, or against, regulation is a matter of personal political opinion, and that, in turn, shapes one's opinion of Bitcoin. This argument makes just as much sense as those for Bitcoin.

Re: The Future of Payments and Open Source Support

#14

Post by PeterisP »

mike_hearn wrote: post #6
the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> author seems to believe he cannot accept tips, because of tax and regulation, but he doesn't point out what specifically would cause problems here. JFTR: "accepting tips" for software is something that is not at all straightforward. The way bountysource and others get around that is through invoices once a large enough amount has accumulated. I have no idea how that works in other countries. Gratipay/bountysource s…

Could you explain why accepting tips is so complicated? What specific law means you cannot do it? Let me put this another way. If your friends give you money for your birthday, do you give it back to them and tell them you can't accept their gift because of tax and regulation? I doubt it! You may well declare the gifts on your tax return if it's big enough to bother with, but if Austria makes it hard to accept cash g…

1) In many countries, unlike USA, a majority of people don't ever handle a "tax return" or "file taxes" - if your income consists of standard salaries or student stipends or social security/etc, then the employer is required to handle everything and you can generally ignore the issue unless you start doing business or selling real estate or whatever. For a normal person, the cost of starting to file taxes (and investigating how it needs to be done) it's orders of magnitude larger than any reasonable amount of tips - generally, hiring an accountant would be cheaper&safer than doing it yourself and any non-standard income less than the accountant fee is not worth the hassle.

2) Those tips are strictly different from personal gifts - they're payment (voluntary, but still) for stuff you did, so tax wise, they would be considered equivalent to commercial export of software. Taxes on international commerce are tricky (e.g., determining if value added tax applies in this case, etc), most jurisdictions have some simplified paperwork, guides and assistance for small business with the expectation that they're domestic, not international.

3) If you're asking "which specific law prohibits" - it's entirely opposite, it's not like there are specific laws for each taxable thing - the general law mandates that any and all income is declarable and taxable, and then there are specific laws to make exceptions for things such as birthday gifts from relatives or tips for waiters.

Re: The Future of Payments and Open Source Support

#15

Post by geofft »

I think what strikes me as the large-scale problem here is that some people are baffled by the concept that not wanting money might be a rational decision. As a completely different example of the same decision being rational, let's remember when Tarsnap wasn't accepting Canadian customers (despite a presumably sizable potential market) because dealing with Canadian sales tax law was too much overhead. Even if the path to accepting money legally is clear and well-documented, it still might not be worth it.

Not to mention I've heard stories of developers whose motivation to work on open-source projects has gone _down_ since getting paid, since it makes it seem like work instead of a hobby.

There is a worldview that seems to me to be prevalent in the cryptocurrency community (I don't know which direction causation runs, but there's certainly a bit of correlation) that everyone wants micropayments and microtips -- cf. the tip bots on Reddit. It's not uncommon to see the tipbots get downvoted, and the tippers to be completely confused why someone might think it unwanted or off-topic. http://www.reddit.com/r/dogecoin/comments/234ds8/tipping_in_...

Re: The Future of Payments and Open Source Support

#17

Post by [deleted] »

maxerickson wrote: post #10
mike_hearn wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you explain why accepting tips is so complicated? What specific law means you cannot do it? Let me put this another way. If your friends give you money for your birthday, do you give it back to them and tell them you can't accept their gift because of tax and regulation? I doubt it! You may well declare the gifts on your tax return if it's big enough to bother with, but if Austria makes it hard to accept cash g…

Why would anybody bother figuring out the specifics to collect $50? You are saying "take it and don't worry about it", but it's also not enough to take on any risk of hassle, let alone fines or whatever.

[deleted]

Re: The Future of Payments and Open Source Support

#18

Post by geofft »

[deleted] wrote: post #16

[deleted]

The bad stuff is irrelevant, but by the same argument, so is the good stuff. This isn't really about Bitcoin as a whole; it's about a specific assumption in the community (everyone wants to be tipped, people who are worried about taxes are misinformed and/or holding up an unjust system) that manifested in a specific use case.

It wouldn't be really accurate to TL;DR a Linux kernel CVE as "somebody introduced a bug in prctl - big deal. Linux can be used for a lot of good stuff." (Nor "bad stuff".)

Re: The Future of Payments and Open Source Support

#19

Post by [deleted] »

geofft wrote: post #18
[deleted] wrote: post #16

[deleted]

The bad stuff is irrelevant, but by the same argument, so is the good stuff. This isn't really about Bitcoin as a whole; it's about a specific assumption in the community (everyone wants to be tipped, people who are worried about taxes are misinformed and/or holding up an unjust system) that manifested in a specific use case. It wouldn't be really accurate to TL;DR a Linux kernel CVE as "somebody introduced a bug in…

[deleted]

Re: The Future of Payments and Open Source Support

#20

Post by lnanek2 »

wdewind wrote: post #2

TLDR; there are two problems with tip4commit: 1. The obvious, that they are collecting funds on behalf of other people's work and then keeping them when the funds go 'unclaimed' 2. Even if you do want to claim it, they don't make it easy, and for someone in a complicated tax country (like the author, Austria) there is almost no way he could accept the money without incurring some kind of risk. So basically when they…

I don't have any use for tip4commit, personally, and couldn't care less if it succeeds either way. I did read the GitHub site, though, and your case 1) is incorrect. They return the money if it isn't claimed.
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