One guy tries to live for a year solely on virtual money
pavlovskitchen.wordpress.com
pavlovskitchen.wordpress.com
If he is able to get by using "virtual" currency, isn't he just demonstrating that it is actually real money?
We're treated as a barter exchange by the IRS, and play by the rules set forth in there. Namely, transactions are treated as taxable, and we're required to provide 1099B forms to all involved parties at tax time.
Also, we're located at http://dibspace.com
Lots of the businesses on Dibspace think of it as a marketing expense that happens to provide very real and tangible side-benefits.
We've had a number of incredible customer success stories with Dibspace, like this company: http://ecomoversmoving.com/
The founder, Grant, started his business with nothing more than a borrowed moving truck and a couple thousand bucks in his pocket in Spring 2009. He learned about Dibspace through a Seattle Times article, joined up, offered his services and had more customers than he knew what to do with within a couple months. Last fall, he told us that his biggest concern with his business was how to manage the growth he was seeing.
Grant was able to offset thousands of dollars of capex/opex by trading our virtual currency for real stuff and services. Sure, if he'd been able to get US Dollars, he could've used them for the same things, but he was dealing with the same chicken and egg problem every new business wrestles with: how do you acquire new customers to pay for things like a website or a logo when you're just starting out and don't have any customers?
You have no reputation on Yelp.
You have no cash to get your name out there.
You don't have a network of existing customers to lean on for referrals.
Getting those seed customers can be incredibly difficult. Grant totally lucked out: turns out people are far more willing to spend 'funny money' than real money, especially during a down economy. He acquired his first batch of customers, got tons of positive reviews he could point prospective customers to (http://dibspace.com/businesses/667-Eco-Movers/reviews), and got tons of word of mouth referrals.
When Grant was ready, he just turned off his offers on Dibspace. When his business gets slow (which happens occasionally), he creates new Dibit offers and fills his schedule back up.
Whew, that was more long-winded than I intended it to be.
I'm sorry, but I'm distracted from the content so much by those.
One could live in his house or on the road and never need to settle down. Just the fact they have internet can be his way of surviving.
I'm not sure how practically they'd find you out. It would probably cost more to establish your bill than you'd end up paying, but I'm lead to believe that if you exchange a cow for goods from a VAT paying business then that business owes the country 17.5% of a cow, etc. Similarly for income tax.
I guess it works like inheritance tax really - they assign a value to the item and tax proportionate to that value.