Bitcoins Fail Currency Test in Scandinavia’s Richest Nation | Hacker News Reader

Bitcoins Fail Currency Test in Scandinavia’s Richest Nation

bloomberg.com

29 pointsT-A31 comments

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It is funny how much the title could change the story perception.

If they titled it "Norway classifies Bitcoin as asset instead of currency". The tone would sound very different.

Another example is this:

"42% of Americans Know What Bitcoin is" [1]

vs.

"6% of Americans Think Bitcoin Is an Xbox Game" [2]

Both articles are talking about the same survey.

[1] http://www.coindesk.com/americans-think-bitcoin-is-xbox-game...

[2] http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/12/6-of-a...

Bitcoins were dealt a blow in Norway as the government of Scandinavia’s richest nation said the virtual currency doesn’t qualify as real money.

I don't see how this is a blow to bitcoin. All this does is leave the door open for people to use bitcoin and escape the tax system without being punished. If the government of Norway didn't accept the physical phenomenon of gravity, would gravity have "failed the test"?

The market is bitcoin's ultimate test. Not the government's recognition of it.

>All this does is leave the door open for people to use bitcoin and escape the tax system without being punished.

Norway ruled that Bitcoins are an asset subject to capital gains taxation. I'm not sure how that leaves the door open for people to dodge taxes.

I'm not sure how that leaves the door open for people to dodge taxes.

Sales taxes...

They don't charge sales tax on barter transactions?

Yes, one pay vat on barter transactions in Norway[0].

But unsure how this works in practice. There are also some minimum that has to be reached before one has to add vat.

0: http://www.frilansinfo.no/hva-er-en-barteravtale

As a private citizen (not a company) you don't dodge sales tax (VAT).

It's a refundable tax for companies, not a claimed tax.

VAT is a tax paid by the consumer, and which is collected by the final seller (to the end consumer). A business which accepts bitcoins would be required to remit the VAT in an acceptable currency. If the business did not collect VAT from the customer, the payment of VAT would be borne by the business.

That is actually more likely a good than a bad thibg. Here in Taiwan bitcoin was just recently classified as commodity like gold, instead of currency. This makes bitcoin businesses and local exchange, bitcoin atm possible, since if it was currency, one would have to get a bank license to do pretty much all that. Let's hope it stays this way, and things kick off. We will be doing some bitcoin+law events here in the Taipei Hackerspace.

Agreed. Here in the U.S., we would probably be in a much better position if FinCEN hadn't decided Bitcoin is a currency earlier this year.

3rded. Commodities have no regulations in my country. A currency would req piles of government approval to trade

Good to know.

What is the effect of treating it as commodity means to bitcoin business in Taiwan?

How is bitcoin perceived in Taiwan?

A lot of things happening at the moment. ~3 weeks ago there was almost nothing, now I heard of 4 exchanges coming online around now or soon, bitcoin ATM is on the way, every week there's bitcoin meetup, just did my first purchase yesterday.

For the regulatory effect, one of the technologically very advanced law firm just did an assessment, it's in Chinese but they promised English translation in the coming weeks. http://www.eigerlaw.com/zh/publications/cat_view/17-publicat... (Alex Tsai, December 2013, 比特幣之介紹及其交易在台灣法律環境之適用) Good to know that Bitcoin is 比特幣 in Chinese :) My email in the profile, can let you know when the English assessment is published.

It's funny how media outlets often use pictures of gold coins with the Bitcoin logo on it to illustrate Bitcoin. If it doesn't have a physical representation they make one ;-)

Make some trinket with a wallet address on it and post pic over on r/bitcoin - instant karma. Everyone wants a physical representation.

These photos are usually of https://www.casascius.com/coins. I wonder if he has made more from press usage than coin sales

Speaking of the dubious benefits of government regulations, Mike Cadwell just had to shut down his casascius coins business after FinCEN sent him a cease and desist letter accusing him of unlicensed money transmission. Note that Mike never accepted U.S. dollars for his casascius coins, so the only premium he got for his coins was in exchange for his coin's design and metals. So people were sending hims Bitcoins and in return they got Bitcoins plus a pretty gold/silver/bronze coin, clearly marketed as non-legal tender.

How anyone could consider this money transmission is beyond me. It's sickening hyper-regulation. And even more sickening is that the FinCEN rep stood in front of congress not even a month ago and assured congress how careful FinCEN was to not stifle innovation with overregulation. Admittedly, casascius coins aren't high technology (although they're very attractive), but the fact that FinCEN was so quick to crack down here does not inspire confidence at all.

How media outlets use images is often painful. New Zealand Herald, APN, is a good example of how to do it badly. Both their app and website are image centric. Images load slowly, and the text jumps as you are reading. Often it's just loading some crap stock image like a police car with lights on or other such filler content. If I wanted images, I'd go to a TV or video streaming news site. I'm trying to wean myself off sites that behave like NZ herald.

Those are actual bitcoins:

https://www.casascius.com/

They're not actual bitcoins. The Bitcoin is a wallet embedded inside of a physical coin. You could take a picture of a USB key and call it a Bitcoin using that logic.

I think I know what bitcoins are. So what is a better image to use then?

The Casascius coin is just fine to communicate the idea. Either that or just the bitcoin logo.

People are selling btc this way on ebay

This is not really surprising, but it does raise one very important question for me.

I have transferred funds to Mt.Gox and traded, will the authorities now automatically assume these are in the form of BTC, and tax me accordingly?

Don't ask hackernews, ask a bookkeeper who is familiar with your local tax laws.

If they do not now they could, in the future, retroactively find you and tax you for gains on BTC since the ledger is public and traceable. If this really concerns you I suggest you read-up on Bitcoin Mixers / Tumblers - but be warned these services could be dubious and take your BTC for their own!

“At the end of the day, I think people want something backing a currency.”

And what, pray tell, backs all the world's fiat currencies? Absolutely nothing.

It irritates me when people talk about "bitcoins", plural. Bitcoin is so divisible that it really seems like more of a "stuff" that can't be pluralized, like sand or water[1].

I forgot where I read it but there was once a description of data that derided the term "datum", singular, to mean one data point. "To anyone who's ever worked with it, data is a _stuff_." Wish I could find the book or article.

[1] Yeah, you can use "sands" or "waters" in a somewhat poetic manner, but that definitely stands out as a special usage.

The terms are "mass noun" and "count noun". You're saying that bitcoin should be regarded as a mass, not a count.

"datum" is pretty common in academic literature. Even more common is treating "data" as grammatically plural: e.g. "The data show..."

There are plenty of examples of plural mass nouns though, and they all have slightly different meanings than the usual sense of the word. peoples, monies, sands, waters, etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_noun#Multiple_senses_for_...

language is complicated, and the rules aren't necessarily rationally intuitive.

Norway fails bitcoin test.

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