48-nation bloc to crack down on using crypto assets to avoid tax
theregister.com
theregister.com
I expect this to be true eventually, but so far Bitcoin has been doing OK as a store of value. Unless people bought in the relatively short peaks, HODLers aren't losing crazy amount of money and one could reasonably anticipate that it'll reach $60k/bitcoin again in the near future.
There seem to be people convinced that the crypto types are coming out a long way behind but I'm not really seeing it in the prices. It isn't as stable as the gold market, but it is easy to draw loose comparisons and acquiring/storing crypto is a lot more normal-person-friendly. It also looks like a strong bet in politically uncertain situations; if there is one asset I'd want when fleeing a country it'd be crypto.
You are right that bitcoin, and a couple of others, are staying strong.
All the crypto I own are behaving with downright steady prices. It has been a boring ride for me so far. The risk of me losing large value quickly seems to have more to do with my questionable key-keeping practices than the market.
He likened it to buying and selling physical gold as a store of value, I hadn't thought of it that way before.
I am still stinging from not buying in when I first became aware of it (approx. $1 at the time) - but I honestly could have bought in at any point of the last 10 years (except the highs of 2021) and still come out in profit.
In no way is it a feature that Bitcoin transactions are expensive. At best it's a negative that that's acceptable given the other benefits.
This is a lot of cope and ex post facto justification. "Store of value which can't actually be used for real-world transactions" was absolutely not the rallying cry for Bitcoin for its first many years of existence, and people only pivoted to that when it became undeniable that Bitcoin was not fit for its original intended purpose. If it serves the new purpose well enough, then great, but don't let your friend fool you that everything is going completely according to plan.
First sentence of the original paper:
> Abstract. A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution. […]
These days it is likely(1) that the majority of Bitcoin transactions by number(2) are being done via the layer 2 system Lightning, which does have nearly instant payments and low fees. Transactions via Lightning are not recorded on the blockchain, even though you can easily hold funds in a non-custodial way.
I happen to be in El Salvador at the moment, and with the exception of the Chivo Bitcoin ATMs run by the government, every single vendor selling things for Bitcoin has accepted Lightning.
1) It's hard to know for sure, as Lightning transactions have quite good privacy, so it's difficult to get estimates of how many there are in total. But decent lower-bound estimates exist: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/markets/lightning-network-sees-r...
2) Of course, by value it's very likely that on-chain transactions dominate, as there are lots of very high value, multi-million+, transactions out there.
In my opinion it's useless as a currency as no one uses it for anything worthwhile.
I could have converted the BTC to another crypto currency .. but I would have the same problem. How to buy something with it?
Why not just buy the thing you wanted to buy?
Au contraire!
Interestingly, even if you had started purchasing at the *all time high* (~US$69,000) on 8 Nov 2021, if you consistently purchased daily, weekly, or monthly, you would still be up something insane like 37%, outperforming basically all other market sectors.
You can check this yourself at a variety of DCA calculators (NB I noticed at least one [https://dcabtc.com/] was broken and didn't have any price data for the last 6 months)
That's a bit minimalistic, no? The "short peak" of $50-60k (around 50-100% more than the current value) lasted something like 6 months AFAIK? To be a store of value, you would hope those fluctuations would be nonexistant.
Store of value should be for everyone, not just the unlucky ones...
No, it hasn't. A store of value is supposed to be stable, it's about volatility. By that same reasoning you could argue that Apple or Tesla stock, or even the stock market in general, is a great store of value. But nobody would ever call it that, because it is far too volatile on a daily basis.
Trying to argue that a vague long-term uptrend in prices makes something a store of value is just more intellectually dishonest cope by cryptobros who are desperate to defend this useless technology.
A stable and 100% predetermined issuance schedule, along with its scarcity, it's what makes Bitcoin a good store of value. The steady uptrend in prices is the consequence.
>useless technology.
Just because it's functionality is limited it doesn't make it useless. A store of value that doesn't require boring the planet, or building empty houses, seems like a great improvement to me. I think that you are conflating the cryptobro culture, with the true value that Bitcoin brings to the table.
Boring holes isn't tenable but using 15 GW of power is acceptable?
>This brings the gold mining industry’s 2020 total to 265 TWh of energy used and 145 Mt of CO2 produced if we use the DePaul study’s numbers and account for 1750 tons of jewelry.
https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/a-comparison-of-bitcoins-env...
"Steady"? What definition of "steady" are you using?
It peaked at US$ 75,000/BTC in Spring 2021, dropped to $40,000/BTC in Summer 2021, went up to $80,000 in Autumn 2021, did a continuous slide down to the $30,000 range in late 2022 and stayed there (dipping all the way to $22,000), it's now been in the $35,000 range for the last few months of 2023, and has jumped to $45,000 range recently.
* https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/BTC-USD/
IMHO that's even more ridiculous than gold (at least in the same time period):
* https://goldbroker.com/charts/gold-price/usd#historical-char...
$35,000
* https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/BTC-USD/
I am not sure why did you pick random numbers that are not supported by your own chart to illustrate your point. BTC did not reach $75K or $80K, it dipped below $22K, and it is not at $45K now.
Have you looked at the price of gold over the last 50-100 years?
Bitcoin is an inherently good long term store of value, because it has deterministic and finite inflation schedule, which is also plausibly immutable (contrary to fiat cryptocurrencies, called "cryptos"). On the other hand, fiat currencies are a lousy store of value, because they have non-deterministic, but always positive inflation schedule, i.e. they are guaranteed to lose value in the long term. These are just objective facts about their inherent properties.
In addition, Bitcoin includes cryptographic property protection, making it a better store of value in jurisdictions where local authorities won't provide property protection, or the cost of property protection is high. For example, in many countries, it's illegal to own US dollars. Bitcoin is easier to hide and use discreetly, compared to anything physical.
Volatility is a property of the market, not a property of the asset. All things considered, bitcoin should get less and less volatile when time goes on, assuming that it continues gaining adoption. Which is given, as it doesn't have any competition.
This is wrong. No one says this.
BTC is non-inflationary? Doesn't matter. You only use it to buy USD or actual currencies. If there's less demand for BTC, BTC value goes down. And guess what? Demand is fickle.
The cyrptographic property protection is ok in theory. But try and point out somebody it's helped? And by that I mean a non-criminal/extortionist/money launderer.
There are a few stories of how Bitcoin helps people in Africa in this short documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7lm7IHnKDw
That really depends on the taxation rules in your jurisdiction.
It still makes bitcoin better than holding dollars (taxes are almost always less than 100% of gains). This seems to be an inherent problem with all "stores of value" and is usually why people choose to invest rather than "store".
I know the real cynical answer is that most people just don’t report correctly, but I’m curious how you’d do it if you wanted to be legit.
I'm not sure why these 48 countries single out crypto assets like this. You can evade taxes by buying gold, heck, there were schemes that bought tons of steel, mobile phones, anything of value.
To me it all seems like just pandering to "crypto=bad" crowd.
Those reports are not to find tax evasion. They are to detect large scale money laundering and to build aggregate money flow statistics (X billions entered/left country in the last year).
Yes, there is, in 2022 it was in PIT 38, sec. E. You need to report purchases even when you have not sold anything as this entitles you to subtract cost when you sell later.
PIT38 is about reporting income from capital gains, it has nothing crypto specific. Certainly there is no section where you're reporting crypto purchases regardless if you made any income or not.
Section E specifically is a summary section where you put totals of tax to pay. There is nothing about crypto in it.
Also you only get PIT 38 made up for you if you've made income from(reported directly by the broker): - stocks - short selling - derrivatives - dividend
If you didn't and you're not reporting any income from financial instruments you do not report any crypto purchases your pit38 will have all zeroes.
Perhaps you confused it with the fact you have to report any shares in ownership of any limited companies, cooperative or other "for profits" you procured without paying for them except when they were exchanged for other shares. This means you have to report shares if your were given them as payment etc. In general it has nothing to do with crypto, but lets say there is an ICO that gives you voting/share of ownership rights like we had with the DAO. And you're a developer, you do some work for the DAO and you're paid with tokens, but you don't sell them. You still have to report this, but that is a very specific situation.
If cryptocurrency was actually used for purchasing goods/services it would be more tricky.
Some of the challenges:
* Figuring out how to classify certain trades (wrapped versions of tokens, bridging assets between chains, staking, etc)
* Making sure I have all trades tracked in the spreadsheet (there is automated software for this, but there are a number of ambiguous situations it doesn't hand well, hence needing to manually track it)
* Spot checking wallets to make sure trades weren't missed
If you do complex transactions thousands of times per year, it would be reasonable to expect (and in many places be a legal duty) to figure out how you'll be accounting for these transactions in your books before the first transaction is made, and keep up to date bookkeeping for these operations continuously - not just making some reporting long after the fact. Like, such activities are so clearly above the level where either you hire a certified accountant or become a skilled accountant yourself, that's table stakes for doing such things. You're effectively running a business, so you're required to act like one, you're not permitted (generally, depends on jurisdiction) to just wing it.
This is ridiculous, which is why most countries don't apply capital gains to currencies regardless of how volatile they are. Bitcoin should be treated no differently. You're already taxed on the income used to buy the currencies in the first place anyway.
If you want to follow the letter of the law, you need to consider each and every transaction in calculating your cost basis, converting to USD at each step. The latter is particularly problematic as it’s possible to transact in something that does not have a clear USD price.
So the usual approach is that people just make up numbers, hopefully using some consistent methodology, and pray/hope/beg that if they get audited it’ll be enough to appease the IRS.
Not having any standard way of getting the details is another problem. If each and every transaction is not recorded at the time of execution, good luck trying to get that detail back again.
If only there were some sort of publicly available record showing transactions performed. (Yeah, I know, they don't include the USD value)
I don’t even mean the USD value. I mean the raw transaction itself.
In theory it’s persisted forever. In practice, the data is neither readily available nor searchable in the ways you’d actually need to properly account for transactions.
On the flip side, if you can’t get the data there’s no chance the IRS would ever be able to figure it out right?
These days the majority of Bitcoin transactions by number probably happen on Layer 2 technologies, mainly Lighting, that do not record transactions directly in the Bitcoin blockchain. There is no publicly available record of Lightning transactions. It's quite difficult to even estimate how many are being done.
I did some crypto trading on an exchange, and while it was able to give me the amounts I traded, it didn't tell me the price of those coins at the time of the trade, or my cost basis for when I got each coin to tell if that trade was a loss, gain, or wash. There was truly no way to be honest about those trades. Luckily I was only playing with small potatoes, it would be a nightmare if I traded in amounts the IRS would care about.
It's basically the same as with stocks. Work out the equivalent USD value for every trade, and subtract the cost basis to figure out how much capital gains/loss you have on that trade. If valuation is hard (you're trading 5 shitcoins for 1 altcoins), figure out a method you can justify with a straight face and taxman will generally be happy (this, incidentally, is why auditing rich people is difficult).
In many countries, since crypto is not regulated, you can't write off the losses, but you still have to pay taxes on the gains.
My point being, this is why it is better to hand these sorts of things off to a third party for auditing. Otherwise, you might end up in a nice pickle with the IRS after having checked that box saying you were trading crypto.
That was quite a few years ago.
I'm pretty sure major exchanges generate the tax form/supplemental schedule/whatever for you in the case of trades on their internal order books (they never really touch chain).
Unless you're doing some very edge case or going out of your way (evasion) there's not much good reason to struggle with some kind of reasonable tax compliance with all of this.
> I know the real cynical answer is that most people just don’t report correctly, but I’m curious how you’d do it if you wanted to be legit.
Not surprisingly when I used to be involved in crypto even discussing an attempt at paying taxes was met with "LOL you idiot bootlicker" types of responses from the crypto community. The only reason they're not in jail or getting hit with heavy penalties from the IRS, etc is because they're too small for anyone to care and audits and budgets for IRS enforcement have been slashed:
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/04/01/heres-why-irs-tax-audits-hav...
Original document: https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/taxation/international-standar...
Absque argento omnia vana
If BTC can take 1% of the FX market its value would be $1.5M, each. As the price of btc rises it becomes less volatile, which makes it more attractive for large transactions. Btc transactions settle without active third party involvement or approval.
Btc, in particular, should be very attractive for International settlements in the future. That's why the OECD wants a piece.
In reality, these laws are made to control money flows and not to improve taxation (the big corporations still avoid taxes and rich people still use expensive lawyers to nullify their tax bill). This will make the business environment for the average person worse. Which, surprise, might push people to actually use crypto as a medium of value transfer instead of speculation. Just hang in there and watch.
The Common Reporting Standard (CRS) is an information standard for the Automatic Exchange Of Information (AEOI) regarding financial accounts on a global level, between tax authorities . . . The idea was based on the US Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) implementation agreements and its legal basis is the Convention on Mutual Administrative Assistance in Tax Matters (MCAA). 120 countries have signed the agreement to implement, and the MCAA remains open for more countries to adopt.
Like SAR, it's a pretext to criminalize privacy.
One is simply using crypto as cash equivalent - a mechanism to receive (and spend) undeclared income without paying the relevant taxes, so that drives adopting pretty much the same regulations as for cash, just as there already are various requirements to declare and deanonymize large cash transaction, the same gets implemented for various crypto-assets.
The other is using NFTs (or similar products) for money laundering, again in pretty much the same way as physical art can be used; the key steps being (a) cheaply buy or make some asset-with-undefined-value; (b) have an "anonymous customer" (your own 'sockpuppet') buy it from you at a high price using cash or cryptocurrency. This can be both a form of partial tax evasion, as the capital gains tax you'd pay on this profit is often much lower than what you'd pay otherwise for that income, and also a form of money laundering, if the funds are obtained, for example, from some scam or ransomware operation. And again, the general solution here is to apply the same regulations as for large quantities of cash, such as requiring to identify the counterparty and thus make the potential laundering traceable.
The sockpuppet that buys from you can sell it downstream at a greatly reduced price to another sockpuppet (or back to you) and report it as a loss offsetting other reported income while the cycle repeats. Obviously anyone involved in this can loop and repeat this any number of ways for a variety of preferred outcomes. Awww shucks, I just made a bad investment and got "unlucky" this time...
I think there is an analysis somewhere that more-or-less proves this is exactly what Lindsay Lohan did via NFTs.
Not new to NFTs or crypto at all but it is much easier and far more nebulous when ugly JPGs of Apes were "trading" in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Getting money from users for a token on which you pay no interest and getting the full interest yourself does seem like a good business, it's just not one that would attract customers that have better options.
OECD is a cartel and increasingly acts like it the past 5 years (global tax rates , seriously)
I know that many people (even just across the UK), would either disagree with this list, or with the various % that should be attributed to each. One persons 'prudent' would be another persons too much/little etc.
By far the largest categories are Social protection and Health, followed by Education, Debt interest and Defense. I guess you want to increase infrastructure spending. So the question is, what are you going to deprioritize?
Source: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/spring-budget-202...
I don’t know enough about the Gaza crypto market to know which state it’s in. But generally, if people are desperate they will try to earn crypto online, and if smugglers can’t get cash out they’ll prefer crypto.
Crypto nerds are completely detached from reality.
Anyway, far more money is sent to Gaza, and Hamas, in the form of Western aid from governments. Stopping the flow and misuse of that money is far more important than crypto.
Here is the summary: https://twitter.com/nic__carter/status/1717210060777009636
- WSJ journalists (Angus Berwick & Ian Talley) write a flurry of articles citing Elliptic data claiming that PIJ (Hamas affiliate) raised $93m in crypto (and cites BitOK claiming Hamas raised $41m) [1]
- Sen Warren uses this article to claim that Hamas raised "over $130m" in crypto. This article is her SOLE citation in her letter. The entire letter depends on the WSJ article [2]
- Over 100 member of Congress sign the letter, which asks for the Biden admin to further crack down on crypto
- Chainalysis comes out with an article disputing the WSJ claims, saying that instead of $82m of terror financing, the real figure is around $450k. It's unclear which wallets they are referring to. Either way, it looks like the WSJ analysis is vastly overstated [3]
- WSJ refuses to follow up or retract, instead writing more articles relying on their claims
[2] https://warren.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/2023.10.17%20Letter%...
[3] https://chainalysis.com/blog/cryptocurrency-terrorism-financ...
Yes, though I said the same thing. Though I also imagine there's a lot of smuggling that has nothing to do with an insurrection.