Buy, sell, send and receive Bitcoin Cash on Coinbase • Hacker News Board

Re: Buy, sell, send and receive Bitcoin Cash on Coinbase

#301

Post by tobiaswk » Thu, Dec 21, 2017, 2:51 PM UTC

jpatokal wrote: post #294

tobiaswk wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I may ask... Why did you have this assumption? I'm asking you specifically because like you said many sold their Bitcoin Cash. I suspect those who didn't were mostly the ones with deeper insight of the underlying technology. When the fork occurred full blocks had already been a problem for well over a year. Segwit was not the solution and overcomplicated the blockchain. This is not debatable anymore. Bitcoin Cash…

Forking anything is hard and forking Bitcoin is designed to be particularly difficult, so regardless of technical merit, the odds were stacked against BCH being able to supplant BTC. To me it seems much more likely that another, unrelated cryptocurrency will eventually fulfill the role BTC was originally intended for.

Turns out it wasn't. Bitcoin Cash was created and now has the same properties Bitcoin had years ago. Fast peer-to-peer transactions. Low processing fees. Its price also seems to suggest that the fork was a success. I think people will soon realise this.

Re: Buy, sell, send and receive Bitcoin Cash on Coinbase

#302

Post by gamblor956 » Thu, Dec 21, 2017, 7:39 PM UTC

nokcha wrote: post #290

gamblor956 wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BCH received in the fork should be treated like the receipt of free money: as income. So, you get taxed on that as if it were cash. If/when you later sell it, you will be taxed again on any gain in the value of the BCH at the time of sale as capital gain (but only on the gain, not the total value of the BCH). Alternatively, if the value has dropped, you will get a capital loss deduction. Whether it is short-term or l…

>BCH received in the fork should be treated like the receipt of free money Why is that? Another way of looking at it is that the value of your existing bitcoin holdings got split between two competing chains. In a rational market, value of your bitcoin holdings pre-fork should be equal to the sum of the value of your holdings on the two post-fork chains.

Because the value of your Bitcoin holdings did not split. You had Bitcoin before, and the same amount of Bitcoin after, but also a new quantity of valuable other-Bitcoin.

And let's not describe Bitcoin as a rational market...Even if that were true, it's not relevant to the tax treatment.

Re: Buy, sell, send and receive Bitcoin Cash on Coinbase

#303

Post by gamblor956 » Thu, Dec 21, 2017, 7:41 PM UTC

nokcha wrote: post #289

gamblor956 wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how the IRS could coherently distinguish between these two cryptocurrencies and treat the sale of one as a long-term gain but a sale of the other as a short-term gain. It's trivial to distinguish between the two. One has existed for several years and the other came into existence in 2017. One goes by the name Bitcoin or Bitcoin Classic, and the other by the name Bitcoin Cash. Legally and for tax purposes,…

>It's trivial to distinguish between the two.... One goes by the name Bitcoin or Bitcoin Classic, and the other by the name Bitcoin Cash. My comment about distinguishing was not about Bitcoin Cash, but about the following counterfactual: >What if the SegWit2x fork had happened, and each of the two resulting cryptocurrencies had roughly equal market cap and each claimed to be the "true" Bitcoin? In this hypothetical s…

I still don't know what you're saying. The IRS doesn't care which one is the true Bitcoin...it's going to treat coins held on each blockchain as separate assets...

Re: Buy, sell, send and receive Bitcoin Cash on Coinbase

#304

Post by kevinyun » Tue, Jan 02, 2018, 10:05 PM UTC

itsthejb wrote: post #299

kevinyun wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest concern in my head is not the prices of cryptos, but how much of a headache it will be to calculate taxes at year-end

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