Alberta man may be first to sell house for Bitcoin
business.financialpost.com
business.financialpost.com
To say that the value of a Bitcoin has been on a roller coaster of late would be an understatement.
I call a top at 120 and back down to 20, all within the next few months. My sell order is at 112.
Edit: In case any one needs a site for shorting (Disclaimer I lend out on this site)
The best thing to do with bubbles is stay the hell away. Better to put your money in an actual investment with real returns.
The future is unknown!
Edit: oh, you mean for him it would be bad if the market fell.
I think you'd have to be crazy to be either the buyer or the seller of this, unless you were doing it for the publicity. I also wonder if they'd agree on the bitcoin price in advance, or if they would pin it to the dollar value up to transfer.
Either way, imagine being the buyer, taking up a loan, maybe buying the bitcoins, and then suddenly not having enough money because the price has gone up/down.
https://twitter.com/rollingdale
Since they're in BC, they can ship to Alberta too!
Is that right? How does that work?
I thought there was some loophole in shipping or tax regulations with Bitcoin :)
That said, variety in wine is already worth exploring.
After looking around, they indeed are: http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/535/tax-implicati...
"Bitcoin would fall in the same category as foreign currency or barter, and would be taxable. In Canada, barter is sometimes exempt from taxation"
It would be interesting to see under what conditions are Bitcoin considered as goods rather than currency.
I'm not sure why people are having such a hard time grasping this.
Even then I think what we're seeing now is a speculation-driven local peak that will die down again.
You're not trying to tell me that the recent spike is based entirely on a sudden spike in trade are you?
However, the inherent cap on the quantity of coins available means that if a market fit is found for bitcoin, and that market grows, the only way is up.
Money is most useful as a medium of exchange. As such its value should be stable on the micro (day to day) level. Slow decrease in value over time ensures that it is not a very attractive store of value, meaning that cash is invested, recirculated and used rather than simply hoarded.
Additionally, a central bank can (and should) act to stabilise the value further. When there are financial crises there are a variety of powers that can be used by a central bank to try and mitigate problems that could be exacerbated in a currency without this feature. Having a central bank with a variety of monetary powers is therefore a positive.
With a fixed supply and an ever-increasing value, bitcoin discourages any investment (why bother with risk? I'm getting richer just sitting here). More than this it massively rewards people who have bitcoin over those just coming into the game, using the economic output of those that are actually productive (be they workers, business owners, entrepreneurs, whoever) to enrich those that just sit idly on a hoard of coins.
This is why I think the fundamental parameters of the Bitcoin currency are unsuitable for large-scale or society-wide deployment.
Right up until that central bank wipes out the middle class when 40 years worth of bills (i.e. inflation) finally come due.
I do love a good bit of hyperbole! I'm not really sure that's happened, has it? In fact it looks to me like the central banks of the world have tried their darnedest not to let their respective currencies collapse, and mostly to good effect.
I certainly wouldn't argue that every fiscal decision made by the powers that be is a good one, or even that they're overall doing a great job. I still prefer them over a currency where there is no ability to do this.
Keeping BTC in a wallet is very much more like just stuffing dollars in a shoebox, the money is dead and removed from the system. It's not driving anything.
No, banking hasn't worked this way for a long, long time.
It's harder to get your hands on BTC now than it used to be.
Most of the pressure on dd has directed it to grow, so demand is going up, and it goes up faster over time. ds is a designed feature of the currency, and is designed to shrink quasi-deterministically.
The supply of bitcoins is not growing in proportion to the growth of demand for bitcoins, thus the price goes up. So it's probably most fair to say that the demand is growing significantly faster than the suppply. However, the most recent halving day has significantly altered the differential between ds and dd.
[1] http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/06/bitcoin-price-plu...
Failure to report and pay taxes on bitcoin-denominated transactions is income tax evasion. One consequence of this is that your tax years never "close," so the IRS has until the end of time (or practically speaking, your death) to audit you and go after the unpaid taxes (in contrast to the normal 3 and 6 year periods for IRS audits).
Bitcoin's fatal flaw is that it is not anonymous. It's even less anonymous than cash. Given enough justification, governments can and will develop systems for tracking bitcoin flows, the same way they already have systems for tracking the flow of paper cash.
The bigger issue is that if you're making a capital gain when selling, then you better damn well report that on your taxes. And note that the realization is at the time of the sale, not when you sell the bitcoins.
If not, why do you feel it's illegal to trade your house for some Bitcoins?
You might have to go to one of their foreign branches to do it though. I don't know if you can just show up at a branch in Iowa (for example) and they would know how/be able to open an account denominated in another currency.
It's not helpful to make things up from your own imagination.
Financial transactions may be conducted in any currency. If they must be reported on your income tax return, they must be reported in both the currency used and USD (if different). You can own a bank account in a foreign currency; there is simply more paperwork involved for the customer and the bank.