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.
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.
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.
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.
Maybe there should be a third category then.
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).