Good. If I have to pay capital gains on normal stocks I don’t see why crypto traders shouldn’t have to also.
Miners would pay income tax, not capital gains...
Edit: I understand that FX trade is not tax free. What I am saying is that we should tax crypto like we tax (or don't tax, depending on where you live) other currencies because that is what they are.
Second, forex traders (and gold owners) have to pay capital gains taxes on any gains.
So, what is your point?
https://spectrum.ieee.org/biomedical/devices/smart-contact-l...
You also can't get around this by simply bartering your assets. Once the asset leaves your hand or control -- be it bitcoins or Yu-Gi-Oh cards -- you owe tax on the difference in the price you paid (valued in USD) and the price it was worth at barter time. It is your responsibility to fairly make this valuation.
This is not rocket science... the IRS website and the published tax codes explain this in great depth.
Don't hate the other players, hate the game that coerce you into paying taxes (i.e punish you) because you have partaken in a peaceful and voluntary exchange with another person.
There are ample examples of robust, thriving, civilizations that had alternative monetary systems before the Private Finance Oligarchy ate the world.
To give you some prep, the next question I'm going to ask is what the quality of life was like for the average individual in those civilizations, including the usual metrics: healthcare, access to food, access to running water, etc.
One step further, if you provide answers for these questions, I'm going to happily show you why it's extremely difficult to extract the incentives for developing these quality of life improvements from capitalism without designing an economic system that looks like it.
Then I suppose you and I will debate whether or not capitalism is perfect, which will be a red herring, because that was never really the point.
Deal?
I think you are making a reasonable assumption that theoretical systems that allow for concentration of capital result in greater technological advancement than theoretical systems that tend to diffuse capital. But the real world is complex and messy. Living people sometimes behave in ways that are surprising to the economist.
It is very difficult to "design an economic system". You either have to devise an incremental path to it from the old system, or march people to it under the threat of death. If you're really going to ask someone to compare historic civilizations with the modern global civilization we have now, you're probably going to need to make some adjustments in order for that to be a fair comparison, instead of one implicitly biased to your own point of view.
I'm not certain it is even possible to do that for a comparison between a pre-industrial civilization and a post-industrial civilization. What we can say for sure is that it hasn't always been this way and therefore it doesn't always need to be as it is now.
If you want to go make a million dollars, more power to you, but you also need to pay your fair share like everyone else.
However if you want to use the Internet, which was subsidized by and developed using research by U.S. and E.U. governments then my counter argument would be that you need to pay the toll of the IRS or whatever other government you reside within.
If you want to start your own nation somewhere and build your own inter-continental communication network then by all means feel free to fund that effort by whatever you deem necessary to achieve that end.
Taxes are needed, however begrudgingly, to fund a government which maintains a civilized and peaceful exchange of commerce. There are no examples I'm aware of where a lawless no-mans-land has resulted in anything more than a region dominated by warlords.
There are lots of public goods that are much more heavily subsidized; gas, electric, water, law enforcement, fire, military...
If you want to take your labor off the farm, so to speak, then go ahead. But you're going to have a very difficult time enjoying as much fruit from your labor your only currency is your own time, with no common economic structure.
> However if you want to use the Internet, which was subsidized by and developed using research by U.S. and E.U. governments then my counter argument would be that you need to pay the toll of the IRS or whatever other government you reside within.
For this matter, how will you travel to meet the other person? Will you take a taxpayer-funded road? Will you take a plane monitored by taxpayer-funded air traffic controllers?
And how do you know the other person won't just shoot you and take your currency? Maybe it's because they're worried that the taxpayer-funded police and public prosecutors will go after them if they do that.
Now all of a sudden I have to pay tax on something I already own? Seems like the government is double dipping. After all I already paid tax on the hardware, the internet connection, the electricity, and countless other market products that allowed me to mine said coin.
I have a couple of choices now.
I can either sign up for Coinbase and sell it and kiss 15% of it good bye or I can go on Newegg and buy stuff directly with Bitcoin.... or go to a bitcoin meetup and sell with cash in-person..... or go on vacation in Europe and get Euro and again keep it off the books.
Which do you think I'm gonna end up doing?
PS: My address has never been tied to an IRL transaction.
PPS: God damn it's easy to troll HN. More salt than the dead sea.
If you mined gold, planted corn, or raised chickens and then subsequently sold any of them you'd pay taxes on the proceeds as well.
> PS: My address has never been tied to an IRL transaction.
Short of using a tumbler to anonymize your source bitcoins and fraudulently declaring a different or fake person as the recipient of the purchase, I don't see how this is possible if you're buying something online.
That's why it's called a capital gains tax -- it's collected at the time of sale (when/if you realize a profit), not at the time of purchase.
You can of course disagree with the concept of income tax, but Bitcoin is no special goose in that regard.
You can find an accountant who can give you advice on how to account for the cost of mining the bitcoin to reflect your effective cost basis (or wing it; the IRS has reasonably good instructions for this sort of thing).
If you go to Newegg and buy stuff, you are obligated under US tax law to pay the capital gains taxes based on the fair market value of the products purchased. If you go to a bitcoin meetup and sell with cash, you are still obligated to pay taxes.
Your legal obligations are clear; whether you can commit the perfect crime or not and get away with it is another matter.
I recently bought a GTX 1080 TI with USD
Amazon wanted to charge me 7%. Newegg charged me no state tax.
Which do you think I went with?
Like our president said.
> "I'm smart for not paying taxes." - The president Source: https://www.cnn.com/2016/09/26/politics/donald-trump-federal...
This is also why people shop in Delaware. I wonder how many of those people reported their purchases to Pennsylvania.
You're legally obligated to remit that sales tax to your state Newegg didn't collect, and if you don't you're breaking the law.
Avoiding taxes is legal, evading them is illegal.
Edit: Announcing you’re evading taxes in a public forum that will eventually be archived just seems like a bad idea.
(like you can pay an income based amount to cover small purchases up to some total rather than calculating the exact tax due)
None of this, whether it's collected or not, eliminates your requirement to pay the sales or excise tax of your home State. In fact, if you go out of your way to order something or perform a transaction in a way that explicitly evades sales tax then you could be in legal trouble with your State's tax agency.
They might not care about a $200 graphics card but they do go after large offenders. Here's an example: http://www.nj.com/mercer/index.ssf/2017/05/broker_from_princ...
> > "I'm smart for not paying taxes." - The president Source: https://www.cnn.com/2016/09/26/politics/donald-trump-federal....
> This is also why people shop in Delaware. I wonder how many of those people reported their purchases to Pennsylvania.
Avoiding paying taxes through legal means is smart. Evading paying taxes is illegal.
They also had to pay taxes on the equipment that they used to mine the gold, and probably taxes on the people they had to pay to manage the operation.
So it could be seen as 'unfair' for someone who mines information to get a pass and only have to pay some of the taxes that a precious metal mining operation pays.
Just to be clear, you're unironically proposing to meet to participate in commercial exchange with someone you can trust not to kill or rob you on account of publicly-funded security, get to the airport on publicly-funded roads or trains, burn energy financed or outright subsidized by public infrastructure, fly out of an airport paid for with public funds and transit safely across the Atlantic using air traffic control and radar services provided by your fellow citizens to get to Europe to enjoy a vacation many Americans can't afford. All to avoid paying taxes on speculative gains.
Now all of a sudden I have to pay tax on something I already own?
If you're subject to this ruling, aka you've by happy accident suddenly realized $20k in profit- consider that whether or not you like how things are working, you've still got nothing to complain about.