Why?
Buying property with ill-gotten gains is an extremely common method of money laundering. Having a large hoard of cryptocurrency that you prefer not to liquidate screams "I'm trying to pretend that this isn't a taxable event."
We don't let people pay their mortgages with pre-tax stock gains, why the fuck are we bending over backwards to let people pay their mortgage with cryptocurrency?
This doesn't make it any easier to evade taxes than it would if you paid with cash. The IRS can subpoena your payments and tax the value of the crypto at time of transaction. If you don't report the sale (payment) of the asset on your taxes, there will be a mismatch that is easily traceable.
This is just the real estate industry adding artificial value by catering to the crypto market.
People worked up that this would enable money laundering seem blissfully unaware how easy it already was to begin with.
It's so strange to me that Hacker News of all places has a very vocal anti-crypto, anti-decentralization crowd whenever any news like this comes out. In other threads they're unironically complaining about "big tech censorship" or the increasing control banks have over one's life!
I can't prove it, but it seems like too much foreign capital that is buying our land is ill gotten, and allowing crypto is just going to make it worse.
I believe we are the Only country that allows foreigners buy property with a phone call, or email.
[0] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1992-02-21-mn-2588-s...
It’d be much easier to just pay my mortgage in crypto, then the endless back and forth that happens to get a bank to take crypto proceeds. (Count yourself lucky if they don’t shut down your entire account!) Crypto users are much like sex workers in this regard.
When my crypto startup launched, it was nearly impossible to find a bank to give us a checking account. We were literally walking around with a VC check and nowhere to cash it. Just because we had the words “cryptocurrency” in our charter. 99% of the banking system hates crypto. This is a smart move to deliver value to an underserved, now very wealthy, customer segment.
The current top comment says "cryptocurrency continues to occupy more and more ground in the financial world. Cryptocurrency continues to expand and grow by every conceivable metric".
It feels like cryptocurrency advocates flip freely between positioning crypto as embraced by the mainstream financial system, or as a foil to the that system, whatever serves their purpose.
This isn't a personal indictment, it's just an observation reading the comments, especially since I shockingly "remain skeptical" per that same top comment.
It's the same as if I were to convert the bitcoin to dollars on my own and pay via dollars. Taxes are still paid in this scenario just as they would be if I converted the bitcoin to dollars and did whatever else with it...
Why so angry about this?
The whole train of thought is weird though. There are plenty of people who pay all of their taxes on everything, but still deal in largely cash.
Then, in the remote chance the business gets convicted later up the road, it will give up 1% of it's quarterly operating profit as a fine.
I mean, duh, that's how US finance operates. </s>
I used a major crypto exchange to sell and convert my holdings into USD, but frustratingly they did not provide adequate documentation to show how the funds were contributed and transferred. I needed to email the exchange's support team, escalate multiple times, and finally they sent me a series of screenshots. The delay almost caused my offer to fall through.
This would have been much easier if I could have transferred crypto directly to the mortgage company.
ETA: according to comments further down, selling your crypto is taxable, whether you get dollar for it or a house. Which makes sense, of course.
Because crypto payments are niche and likely come with more hassle (e.g. volatile value, lender needs dollars and has to take on any risk with liquidating bitcoin/other cryptocurrencies). You might as well ask why US mortgage lenders don't accept payments in RMB or Euros.
Exactly.
>> It's an additional source of revenue for them.
Not all revenue is good though. If I spend $1,000,000 to get $5,000 in extra revenue, it would be a pretty bad business decision. A lot of crypto is hype, and I'm not sure there's much actual real revenue in supporting it for anything besides speculation.