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I spend a lot more yen than you do rupees, have USD denominated reporting and payment obligations, and have asked my professional representatives about this. I was told a variant of "De minimis non curat lex." ("The law does not concern itself with trifles.")

This is similar to income-shaped small transfers of money within families; there would be Congressional hearings if the IRS found a deficiency in mandatory withholding taxes on babysitting money, which is unambiguously earned income of a statutory employee.

>And yet this is what people using cryptocurrencies are expected to do.

Maybe because the IRS declared years ago that cryptocurrencies will be treated similar to other commodities?

And while I don't know the tax code, I suspect if you convert your USD into rupees, and those rupees suddenly increased value tenfold, and you started buying Mercedes with them, the IRS likely will come after you there as well :-)

There's a $200 threshold for reporting gains. Almost no one hits that while traveling.

Crypto is basically different because the high volatility resulted in large gains being realized.

Source: publication 525 https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p525.pdf

Do it for a few million USD instead of few hundred and the IRS will definitely care.

The IRS has decided to treat cryptocurrency as an asset (like gold) instead of a currency.

Well a lot of people are treating cryptocurrencies as speculative assets. ICOs wouldn't have been such a big thing if people didn't do that.

So why shouldn't the IRS do the same?

The ICO market crashed and trading volume on crypto exchanges keeps dipping lower and lower and lower. Its main use-case has shifted back to currency after a failed bid as a security.

Can you refer me to the source of "crypto exchanges [volume] keeps dipping", please? I'm looking at BTC volume and it's not dipping at all. There was a sharp drop in Jan '17 when Chinese exchanges were forced to close. Other than that volume correlates to the price.

This is a relatively new change though, as in the last year/couple of months. So I wouldn't expect the IRS to have shifted it's treatment. Especially in the context of 2018 taxes.

Which I think is a mistake. The tax code should be accommodating; it should not be adversarial.

Many people do not treat bitcoin like gold, they treat it like a paypal account.

Strongly disagree. In terms of both actual usage and the rhetoric I most commonly see on crypto fora (“digital gold!”, “store of value!”), commodity, not currency, is the correct categorization.

Just because some people are loudly shouting it's only a "store of value" (i.e. they only speculate with it), doesn't mean others aren't using it as money. Furthermore that's only the Bitcoin maximalists and it doesn't apply to all other cryptocurrencies (since Bitcoin is only really useful for speculation).

Maybe there should be a third category then.

> It would be insane for me to try and track the value of the rupees (in USD) for every time I bought something, and calculate the deltas between that and what I originally gave to the money changer. It is completely impractical to do that,

It is much more impractical to track the value of fluctuating (maybe x1000 more fluctuations than the USD?) cryptocurrencies though.