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Comment by fauigerzigerk | Hacker News Reader

I would very much prefer to use something other than WhatsApp (especially as Facebook has banned me for life from all their other apps), but my attempts keep failing.

My wife won't use Signal because it includes a crypto wallet and crypto transactions are taxable.

Matrix/Element would be my preferred option, but it causes so many security or encryption related issues that it has scared off everyone I tried using it with. Nobody knows what to do with the incessant popups demanding to "verify" something or other. Nobody (including myself) knows why older messages often can't be decrypted.

Telegram is less secure than WhatsApp.

Threema is not free, which makes it difficult for me to ask people to install it. It's not open source either.

iMessage is Apple only.

So what's left besides WhatsApp?

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> My wife won't use Signal because it includes a crypto wallet and crypto transactions are taxable.

I think the crypto wallet is lame, and am disappointed the Signal folks decided to integrate something like that, but it's entirely opt-in. If she doesn't want to worry about being taxed on crypto transactions, she can simply not use that part of the app. I actually forgot for a second it was there until you brought it up, and I'm a daily Signal user.

I told her it's not activated by default but she doesn't want to touch crypto with a 10 ft pole. She says if it's in there then tax authorities might eventually come asking if the feature becomes popular. And then she would have to keep evidence of not actually using it.

I think her concerns are overblown, but it shows how incompatible taxable transactions are with a privacy focused app. The two things should be kept well apart.

[Edit] Politically, it kind of defeats the purpose as well. You want to be able to argue that you have a right to privacy when it comes to personal communication. You don't want to be in a position of having to defend the privacy of trading securities.

This is why I also have my signal set for automatically disappearing messages. I want you all to try to delete your messages if you have iCloud turned on. It’s impossible and if you managed to do it they’re stuck on the server for 30 days. Apple is a spy service.

It does not show this.

Separately, you've either misunderstood her position, or it's poorly thought out, and/or ideologically based.

What path would tax authorities use to ask Signal users (and only Signal users) if they've used cryptocurrency?

>What path would tax authorities use to ask Signal users (and only Signal users) if they've used cryptocurrency?

Tax law. In the UK, every single payment in cryptocurrencies, however small, is a taxable disposal that you have to include in your tax return if your total proceeds or gains from all investments are above a certain threshold.

I'm not ideologically opposed to cryptocurrencies and neither is my wife. She's just allergic to anything that could potentially raise tax questions.

Now I'm seriously wondering how hard is to fill taxes in the UK. I think I have done worse mistakes than a few cents in crypto and all I got was having to resubmit the forms.

Edit: On second thought, I don't own a business, so I guess nobody is going to look into my tax fillings with the same suspicion since they do not expect me to be doing anything funny with my accounting.

>Now I'm seriously wondering how hard is to fill taxes in the UK

Doing it correctly is non-trivial. You have to submit a so called computation for each individual disposal, which can easily run into several pages.

The algorithm for working out the cost of a disposal is actually a pretty interesting test case for learning a new programming language or paradigm. Try implementing UK share identification rules in SQL for instance :)

You do not have to activate the "crypto wallet", even less use it.

I responded to this in the other thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38580504

TIL it even has one.

I wish watching ads on Facebook was treated as personal income that you have report to IRS. Social graph would fix itself in a nanosecond.

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