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Comment by shiado | Hacker News Reader

Anybody who has followed cryptocurrency in the last year knows that major US financial institutions and hedge funds have become heavily involved. The regulations coming are entirely to do with making the legal burdens of individual custody onerous enough that users place their coins on completely centralized exchanges to manage legal risk, all so these institutions have access to these coins for manipulation purposes like borrowing for shorting. The ONLY regulation you will see is on the average user so they can suck up coins like Daniel Plainview drinking your milkshake, NOT on market manipulation or trading habits of institutions which is the key driver of malicious activity and harm in the cryptocurrency space.

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> for manipulation purposes like borrowing for shorting

I see this repeated a lot and I'm still not entirely clear why people feel this way. Most major markets in the world have futures/borrow mechanisms, and one of the key reasons is that it allows shorting.

Short selling is a critical element to any healthy market, and we've seen time and time again that markets without well functioning short selling are far more vulnerable than those with (i.e. real estate).

For instance, let's presume that crypto takes off, and business start accepting crypto for contractual obligations. If my future costs are in fiat, but future revenues are in crypto, I have a big mismatch with a very risky asset. A futures market (or shorting) allows me to hedge that risk out and protect myself against future volatility. I can lock in my fiat today, to ensure that I can cover my future costs. Without such a mechanism, I might not be able to risk a collapse in crypto markets.

Mature features (like borrows/futures) in crypto markets should aid in adoption.

I think the issue isn’t that shorting and other functions exist, but that these aren’t carried out by most retail investors. So frequently financial firms will benefit on this functionality using the base accounts of their customers.

So the introduction of this intermediation creates value possibility for large firms away from individuals.

any US resident with a pulse and a SSN can open an account with Interactive Brokers and trade /BTC futures.

Just because they don't doesn't mean they can't.

Shorting is available to pretty much everyone now, especially with Robinhood et al and easy access to options markets (of course most people don’t understand vol and probably shouldn’t trade options). But it’s been easy to short even on the legacy brokers for as long as I can remember (a decade plus).

The issue with shorting is that you have theoretically unlimited downside which means greater risk and familiarity with concepts like margining. That is often outside the grasp of the average retail investor.

>NOT on market manipulation or trading habits of institutions which is the key driver of malicious activity and harm in the cryptocurrency space.

How much evidence is there of major institutions acting maliciously in the cryptocurrency space, and the scale of the impact?

I'm sure there's likely quite a bit of market manipulation from some people or entities who hold a lot of cryptocurrency assets, but as much as I despise finance and financial institutions (of pretty much any kind), I also want to know who to hate even more, if applicable.

(Not asking in a rhetorical or contrarian or skeptical way; genuinely trying to understand who's accused of what and why. And excluding Tether, since we all know the accusations, there, and the comment seems to be directed at major US financial institutions that were huge long before Bitcoin was created, if I understand correctly.)

There's no need to invoke conspiracy theories about market manipulation. The Senate needed money for this bill, they saw that probably a lot of folks with crypto holdings are evading taxes, and they wrote this provision to make it easier to collect the taxes. It's poorly written, but the clear intent is for companies like Coinbase to have to file 1099s so the government knows who made how much every year, just like they do with conventional stock brokerages.

Crypto can be withdrawn from exchanges to a personal account that only that individual controls. This is unlike stocks, which sit in brokerages and could only be transferred to another brokerage (in kind transfer).

An example for someone in the US is that they buy crypto on Coinbase, and then they withdraw that crypto to a hardware wallet that they have control of. They leave their crypto on their hardware wallet for a few years and then transfer all or maybe only some portion of it to a different exchange, say, Kraken, and sell it there. How do the exchanges file a 1099 for that?

Maybe while the crypto was on the individual's hardware wallet, they also used some of it to purchase some goods or services. How is that tracked except on the individual's tax return?

I'm for regulation because I think it means the crypto space will mature and more people will feel it is safe to get involved. I also don't think people should use crypto for avoiding taxes (I do think that is overblown in the media considering that most blockchains are literally a public ledger, and all the government needs are some crypto experts and they can look at current as well as previous years of transactions, so folks shouldn't be doing anything shady).

I do also think that laws should adapt to new technological innovations. The only issue is that there isn't a critical mass yet that this technology is here to stay. The analogy is like fitting a square peg into a round hole. That's what the government is trying to do by over regulating crypto with regulations from the 20th century.

I actually would love if crypto exchanges could somehow give 1099s. That would extremely simplify the crypto tax reporting process, which right now can be very complicated, but I just don't see how it would work unless individuals only bought crypto on an exchange, left it on that exchange, and only sold whatever they bought on that exchange.

If someone withdrew their crypto, or deposited fresh crypto and sold it the exchanges would note it as part of the 1099, just like a brokerage would if you transferred stock. It would then be the taxpayer's responsibility to correctly report their buy and sell prices. You could cheat, of course, but you might get caught. Issuing 1099s at least simplifies the tax process and captures capital gains in a lot of cases.

It is already the taxpayer’s responsibility to report their capital gains.

The IRS has issued "John Doe" summons to Coinbase in 2016 [1] and Kraken in 2021 [2]. They also already gave warnings to 10,000 US tax payers, in 2019, that they thought did not pay their fair share of crypto taxes [3]. They are working with plenty of information already.

Anyone who chooses to omit capital gains from crypto may also see consequences in the future. Most blockchains are immutable public ledgers. The auditing of this technology will only get more advanced over time.

To your point about depositing, how does the exchange know the original price that the crypto deposited was purchased at, when it could’ve been purchased elsewhere (including a different centralized exchange like Coinbase, Kraken, KuCoin or Binance, or a decentralized exchange like Uniswap), or perhaps it was mined, or perhaps it was from a fork of another coin (with the current US tax laws, the cost basis is zero from a fork). It’s not as simple as you are making it sound when the source of the crypto is unknown.

How would formal verification actually work for a single exchange to calculate cost basis, i.e. the gain or loss, considering all these different cases? The people making these laws do not actually know in practice how these things would be enforced by the exchanges. They are trying to fit old securities laws into a new technology. Just saying that's it's too complicated is not the right answer. I think laws should be adjusted to accommodate for new innovations. I also think people should pay their taxes and crypto should not be used as a method of tax avoidance.

[1] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/court-authorizes-service-john...

[2] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/court-authorizes-service-john...

[3] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/26/irs-is-warning-thousands-of-...

I agree that the end effect will be largely what you suggest: aggregate activity in large institutions at the expense of smaller startups and decentralized protocols. But from talking to people in the space, it seems that most of the large exchanges and hedge funds are vigorously oppose to this law. Bryan Armstrong (the CEO of Coinbase) has repeatedly and publicly criticized the bill.

I'll cite Hanlon's Razor: Never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence. I think this is simply the result of what happens when we decide our government should be run by a bunch of octogenarian lawyers, most of whom's tech knowledge ends at their ability to reset their WiFi router. Is it really that surprising that Biden, Schumer, Portman, McConnell, Yellen, Pelosi, etc. have no understanding about how crypto works? They were all born before the charge card was even invented.

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