American convenience store chain Sheetz will accept Bitcoin payments | Hacker News Reader

American convenience store chain Sheetz will accept Bitcoin payments

blockcrunch.co

16 pointsanandaverma1820 comments

Sounds great, but if every gas station fill up will result in a 'taxable event', people will need more infrastructure around tracking and reporting those activities. This feels like the opposite of some rewards card/program - every time I fill up, I'm not getting some "free reward", I'm adding to my tax-reporting data collection tasks.

Cost basis accounting is hardly a show stopper.

Every gas station fill-up already results in sales and gas tax.

Those are handled for you and included in the price.

Yeah, OK. Much onerous record-keeping obligation associated with those, is there?

All you need is what you bought the btc for in USD and what it cost in USD when you spend it. You pay tax on the difference. It's not complex at all.

Which btc are you spending? Most recent ones? Or oldest?

Fifo rules apply (first in, first out)

I'm genuinely interested to hear how this gets implemented in a way that's not grossly time-consuming.

As I understand it, the requirement is basically that every time you use BTC for a purchase, you're required to identify the USD basis for the BTC and take a gain or a loss according to the USD value of the transaction, right?

For me, it's painful enough to do that for a relative handful of stock trades throughout the course of the year, and that's with my brokerage tracking the basis and sale price of various lots for me.

I can't even begin to imagine the nausea of having to track all that myself and report it.

pip install cryptotax (seriously)

not sure why that would necessarily apply.

with any stocks I own, I can choose which lots to sell. i don't have to handle them as FIFO.

Every spend of Bitcoin results in capital gains.

There are like a half dozen crypto tax services listed with direct import into TurboTax.

I can't imagine anything more convenient than waiting around for over two hours to ensure my transaction is confirmed: https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_confirmation_...

Confirmation time has also recently spiked to over two days.

BTC has many of the attributes of an asset like gold, but as a currency, transaction times make it something of a bust.

This article is really about the payment processor Flexa and it would be more relevant to discuss the user experience with that

Maybe they really accept other crypto assets

Maybe they subsidize transaction fees for some time

Maybe they broadcast later

Maybe they accept 0 confirmation

Not gonna work. Bitcoin people are all for adoption but only on paper. In reality, nobody wants to pay for gas or purchase a pizza using bitcoin. All these people care about is speculation and 'beating the market'.

And by "accept bitcoin payments" they mean they'll use the payment processor Flexa which I assume accepts bitcoin, their homepage doesn't mention them.

lol Flexa

I was in a chatroom with one of their advisors trying to shill me on Flexa for several years

Takes that long to close a deal with crypto companies, huh. And only during the hottest market in history

Presumably it's really Bitcoin to dollars to trade, which seems pointless because if you are doing that, why not just keep some dollars?

Why it is flagged?

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