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Comment by Synaesthesia | Hacker News Reader

Quite simply it's a competitor to the dollar, which is illegal within the US. You cannot issue currency in the US, to my knowledge.

Source for US federal law that would make it illegal?

Of course, the feds are going to require taxes to be paid in USD, so you will need USD at some point.

Here in Switzerland, you can pay taxes with crypto (at least in the cantons of Zug and Ticino). Money is money.

You can pay CO state taxes with crypto too. The governor of CO, Jared Polis, gave a talk at ETH Denver last year. It's way too late to ban.

That's actually pretty cool. Is Monero an option?

Credit card companies issue "points" which is effectively (faux) currency, with which people do arbitrage vs dollars, for a counterexample.

That’s nonsense. You can’t pay taxes with other currencies, but issuing IOUs/gift cards is absolutely legal.

> Quite simply it's a competitor to the dollar, which is illegal within the US. You cannot issue currency in the US, to my knowledge.

The USA has already ruled that Bitcoin is NOT a currency...

I wish that they hadn't done that

That wouldn't matter. The issuance is over and was never preventable.

Bitcoin is still being issued, unless I misunderstood what you meant.

There's no stopping it, is the point. It was an inevitable creation.

But if you use Bitcoin for a transaction, you have to treat is a a stock, not a currency... and declare tax gains/losses every time