Japan to regulate Bitcoin trades, impose taxes | Hacker News Reader

Japan to regulate Bitcoin trades, impose taxes

asia.nikkei.com

66 pointstrendspotter36 comments

Just in time for Japan to have no exchanges to regulate. (Other, I guess, than LocalBitcoin. Which may or may not count, and would be hard to deal with anyway.) Or does someone know of one that doens't show up on any of the charts? Gox is the only JPY exchange I've seen.

Question is: does this help or hurt MtGox's chance of resurrection? Probably makes it less likely to happen, but somewhat more likely that people will come back if it does.

> Japan's consumption tax, which is set to rise to 8% on April 1

So they're actually going through with this, when the economy has been depressed for over a decade...?

Only in America is a tax increase equated (without any further investigation) to depressing the economy, and a tax break (once again without investigation) equated with letting the peacock that is the economy fly free.

Indeed. But I hope you're not implying I am doing that. ):

Love, a liberal Canadian bent on destroying freedom, liberty, capitalism, and all things good.

> Only in America is a tax increase equated (without any further investigation) to depressing the economy

That's not strictly true. There are other countries who harbor economists possessed of half a brain and theory describing the basic principles of how quasi-rational actors behave in various situations. They just usually don't get listened to. :)

Promising free lunches for everyone is much more popular and gets you elected! :D

Theory is dumb when all empirical data disagrees with it. Good thing the Austrian's figured this problem out by ignoring data. It's the true hacker's way.

You have to afford the Austrians some sympathy. They know, just know, that their economic theories are correct and just. However, they kept running into a problem: there's so much troublesome data that proves the opposite of their beliefs. One day, Ludwig von Mises discovered that the scientific method itself was flawed. So he created a new system to replace it by fiat: "praxeology." Problem solved - now science confirms everything Austrians believe. No need for data.

I'm sure you have multiple studies with mountains of data which clearly demonstrate that the economy is at its most prosperous at a marginal tax rate of 100%. Oh, man, you guys are so cute. :)

So the only possible marginal rates are 0% and 100%. Good to know.

Clearly.

You're dumb. Please read an actual book on economics not associated with Mises or his filth.

Why do you think their economy has been depressed for over a decade? Every time they show a glimmer of growth, they yank out the rug from underneath by raising taxes.

Why do you think their economy has been depressed for over a decade?

While it is incredibly complex, the fact that their population has been static, trending towards declining, has played a significant part of it.

In many countries, economic growth is just a side effect of population growth -- every number gets bigger, but the actual wealth of each individual person is static or in decline.

Japan economy has not been depressed. Stagnant maybe, but over the last decade unemployment rate was only 5%.

That's right. The main problem is deflation. Monetary policy has been effective in the last year, but increasing sales taxes could wipe all of that progress out.

So I'm depressed, not Japan. :)

Is anyone else skeptical of the government's ability to effectively tax bitcoin? The scale of doing so both technologically and physically seems far too complicated for such a minute market.

This is even true of cash — people get paid under the table all the time. However, if you get caught doing that too much…

It doesn't need to be any more sophisticated than the taxing of every other asset that gets traded. When you realize a gain or loss from buying or selling gold bars, train engines or copy machines you're expected to report that.

If you make a lot of money buying and selling Bitcoin, you're probably going through exchanges that are licensed and can be subpoenaed for records if your own are in question. If you are accepting Bitcoin as payment on a website, you're probably using something like Coinbase to facilitate it, which means there are 3rd party records of your income.

If you're trading drugs on Silk Road #3, maybe that won't be taxed, but neither are most cash transactions on Craigslist; the government doesn't attempt to put an auditor in every home to catch every transaction that's supposed to be reported.

plenty of options to take BTC without the need for a 3rd party payment processor, that will ultimately require honest traders to report accurately, not much difference to how a cash business works now e.g pub, restaurant, builder etc.

Legitimate companies are definitely susceptible to being taxed as they are supposed to report certain parts of their financials. The average consumer will likely be affected by this tax by an increase in the BTC prices they are paying for goods.

This could be strategic to prevent illegitimate companies from using BTC because if they are not paying taxes properly, the government has motivation to investigate the company. Honestly, I think this is probably a good thing because it will make it hard for companies dealing in illegal services to operate (although only slightly).

A concern I have is whether taxing transactions will make it more difficult to make quick and easy transactions on the internet (one of things that makes bitcoin so great).

And, I am also a little skeptical because it will be really hard to enforce even for legitimate companies. I think that if the government wants to support cryptocurrency, and tax it at the same time, then they're going to have create their own cryptocurreny protocol. I almost reckon that they'd need a system where the blockchain was hidden from outsiders (basically, transactions would not be anonymous to the government, and users wouldn't be able to publicly see transactions aside from confirmations from the government).

Where does this idea come from that Bitcoin is somehow special from every other taxable commodity and is somehow harder to tax?

They don't tax Bitcoin, they tax you, and you can evade taxes in any currency or commodity if you're extremely careful and not very risk averse.

Barter is taxable, yard sales are taxable; people don't report them because it's too small to get noticed but if you're making a killing doing it, you're going to get caught.

In the US we tax anything that you could remotely consider income. For example if you agree to do some IT work for your dentist in exchange for a couple of fillings, you are supposed to report the fair market value of the transaction and pay tax on it. That is probably hard for the IRS to track down and enforce, but it doesn't stop the tax law from existing.

http://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc420.html

What challenges does taxing Bitcoin have that are harder than e.g. taxing the exchange of dollars for license keys? Ogaki manages that every year, and I can guarantee you that most people at the office don't even understand what a license key is.

IMHO this is a watershed event. It recognizes that Bitcoin has perceived value enough that the regulator is compelled to protect consumers. Never mind how regulation can be gamed internationally, the recognition is so significant I'm going to investigate speculating on Bitcoin's future having kept out so far.

In the US, they regulate penny stocks, and those things are only worth a few pennies. The issue isn't the value of the commodity--it's the potential for avoidable loss due to market manipulation.

>they regulate penny stocks, and those things are only worth a few pennies

You understand that the value of something is not tied to the value of its base unit, right?

If you want to be pedantic, the value of a base unit of Bitcoin is about $.000006.

Hi, I respectfully disagree with your comment that the issue here is the potential for avoidable loss.

Loss of value is the counterfactual to value, or to put it another way, you cannot worry about avoiding losses until you have something to lose.

The regulator has therefore sent a signal to the market that Bitcoins have value by the virtue of the very regulation it will use to protect consumers from the loss of Bitcoins.

My point is that not all market signals carry equal weight and a market signal given by a regulator is significant.

So I'm guessing this will work on the retailer/exchange side? Any transaction of guaranteed value (i.e. not just shifting wallets, but something like BTC->goods or BTC->cash) will just have a built-in extra cost in JPY equivalent, if the party gaining money is definitely in Japan?

Sounds great to me, though the volume will be very small to begin with. This is a great opportunity for sites and services to demonstrate legitimacy in the eyes of the law and their users. Of course there will be some dark exchanges and the like for those who'd rather not have a tax record attached to their wallet, but for lots of people this will be very beneficial.

> Banks will be also be prohibited from handling bitcoins while securities firms will be barred from brokering bitcoin trades, the Nikkei reported.

Really? Maybe a silly question, but if banks aren't allowed to handle bitcoins... who is? Only individuals? Does this really outlaw ALL bitcoin banks?

Yesterday a kind reader posted a translation of a Mt Gox audio statement from Japanese. I'd be really eager to learn more about what's going on here but I keep running into language barriers.

Are they actually regulating bitcoin or cryptocurrencies?

What's to prevent everyone from just moving to Dogecoin or Likecoin or some other substitute to stay off book?

Well, the existing value in Bitcoin, for one. I'm mining dogecoin largely to learn a little bit about these currencies, but if everyone did move over, by the time it reached the same value Bitcoin has it'd be regulated too.

From what I've read, I doubt the Japanese government (mostly Aso, whose game I'm guessing this is) actually understands that there are other cryptocurrencies.

Similar to "bath salts," that legal trickery may work for a while, but the law will eventually catch up if a government is motivated to stop something.

This is actually a good thing.

Why? Leave it be.

Regulating the sale and trade of goods is a thing that governments do, as is taxing the income and assets that an individual controls.

But what gives them the right to regulate a market they did not create?

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