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Comment by notheguyouthink | Hacker News Reader

I also wonder how this will deal with crypto coins that are specifically designed to avoid monitoring.

Seeing as it's insanely easy to set up an alternate address in any coin, and that whatever the US government knows of my coins could just be a tiny percentage.. how would they know how much to tax me on?

It seems so difficult as to be almost useless. Makes me think they'd be better off just considering it a foreign coin, and only tax what goes into and out of USD. I dunno, clearly I'm out of my element haha.

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What good is the coin if you can't ever spend it? Sure, you can hid it away somewhere the government can't find, and just sit on it... but then what? When you eventually want to spend it on SOMETHING, unless you're going completely black market, there's going to be a record. When the guy making $50k/year suddenly buys a $2.5 million house, the government is going to ask you where that money came from.

I never said anything about not spending it. Clearly though if you bring money over to USD, it's quite visible and taxable. To be honest, I don't know what your point is.

If I make 50k/y and buy a 2.5m house with cash, the gov is going to ask me where it came from too. What's this have to do with my comment questioning the governments ability to track anonymous coins?

Anonymous coins _(if working properly)_ are effectively the same as cash. So the same concepts and limitations apply regarding the governments taxation on it. No?

They track cash via audits. The same thing will happen with anonymous coins. So if your apparent income (tracked purchases) is larger than your declared income you can expect an audit, no matter where the extra money came from.

That is exactly my point. I said it's the same as coins.

They can't and won't, anyone savvy enough can obfuscate it enough. This is just fear mongering for the masses, in other words, business as usual for the government

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