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Comment by PretzelPirate | Hacker News Reader

I’m in the minority in that I’d like to be able to spend my cryptocurrency in a way that:

1. The card handles also selling some off for taxes every transaction and put that in an interest-accruing account.

2. The card tracked my capital gains for each transaction for easy reporting on taxes.

3. The card provider will help manage fees - I’d rather bulk deposit funds to a layer2 and have fee-less payments over having to wonder what the current network fee is.

I’d prefer if it wasn’t MasterCard since I use Visa cards, but I can’t complain too much.

The reason I want this is that I have a lot of money in cryptocurrencies and I’d rather not sell them into other assets at the moment.

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> I’d prefer if it wasn’t MasterCard since I use Visa cards, but I can’t complain too much.

I'm curious: is this because your preferred bank mainly issues Visa cards, or are there things about MasterCard that you don't like?

My bank mainly issues Visa cards. I’ve had multiple cards throughout my life, and I’ve never had a master card before.

I’d like to just add this feature to my existing cards that I already have set up for payments.

Completely off topic:

What I really want in life is:

1. If I could have a virtual credit card that could act as a proxy card and would let me use different cards based on the items I was purchasing (ex: if I’m getting gas, one of my credit cards may give better rewards)

2. A virtual mailing address that would resolve to my current address when used with any shipping provider. I move every few years and hate mail forwarding and updating my address everywhere.

Settle down and have kids. Your problems will be solved.

Not necessarily if one works for a firm that moves you every few years. My family and I have lived in 5 cities in the past six years, due to changing work assignments.

I hope they pay you well. Moving is the worst.

> 1. The card handles also selling some off for taxes every transaction and put that in an interest-accruing account.

> 2. The card tracked my capital gains for each transaction for easy reporting on taxes.

How should it ever do that? It would basically have to limit you to spend Bitcoin that you acquired over that exact same card (like when you buy Bitcoin via PayPal) and that you hold in a virtual wallet provided by that card network operator. Otherwise they'd be unable to tell how many $ you paid to acquire the Bitcoin you just spent.

As a related question: how comfortable would you be with a cryptocurrency-backed electronic payment card that would require you to keep your Bitcoin in the wallet of Visa/MasterCard/whatever (or their associated banks or crypto custodians) in order to spend them?

> Otherwise they'd be unable to tell how many $ you paid to acquire the Bitcoin you just spent.

This is a massive reconciliation and record keeping overhead problem if you live in a jurisdiction that taxes crypto transactions for capital gains/losses. Michael Saylor said just recently in his interview with What Bitcoin Did that MicroStrategy plans to only use bitcoin as a treasury reserve asset and not as a transactional currency precisely because of the record keeping overhead.

You could enter your basis when you transfer coins into the account.

This is how it works with other assets. If you transfer stocks between brokerage accounts, they communicate the basis as well.

How is this not solved by simply selling portions into fiat that cover expected spending needs, i.e. budgeting, and then transferring to bank account which is tied to your current credit card?

"Spending" and "transacting" is a solved problem, namely fiat and credit.

Why do crypto-assets, specifically Bitcoin, need to solve this problem?

Yikes. I was going to reply this is my biggest question/concern.

Cap Gains on btc profit is crazy insane. I guess it's offset if value increases 100% since you bought - but that's still a big tax tax on anything you buy.

Maybe you can get lucky and set some type of tax advantage first in first out during down swings to take a loss?

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