'In 1998, a British newspaper reported that he paid Sri Lankan boys for sex, leading to the cancellation of plans for Prince Charles to knight him on a visit to the country.[46][47] The accusation was subsequently found to be baseless by the Sri Lankan police and was retracted by the newspaper'
Here is a counter point I would argue. Anyone can make a Bitcoin fork, in fact Bitcoin forks are being made every week now. Is every Bitcoin holder now liable for that?
Also these forks often collapse, so when was the income gain? The same day? You'd have people owing more tax than their entire net worth. (Forks often pump in the first day/week then drop to nothing.)
If this is possible then you could attack every Bitcoin holder by making millions of forks each day and making lots of trades to give each fork real value. If you don't declare each fork you end up getting penalties.
I would imagine a more sane way to deal with this is like how the ATO deals with Bitcoin mining. You mine Bitcoin but it's not realized until transferred to a third party.
I would argue the same for forks.
A fork is made, you have coins. But it's not like you received those coins. Technically you always had them as they are old coins just now on a different chain. If you sell the coins then it's a gain that you owe tax on.
But forcing each user to track every fork as income is impractical and not viable. You'll see more of this as thousands of forks come into existence over the coming years.
This is something I would actually look into getting a private ruling about.
That's the way it's treated in UK law, but apparently in the US, you're liable for the tax as soon as you have access to the asset. I think the same thing causes people problems with stock options. Seems like an odd bit of legislation.
Hmm, are you sure? I thought that if you held bitcoin for over a year, it would be taxed as capital gains? Meaning you don't realize the value until you sell it?
It seems to me that forks are treated more like RSUs (restricted stock units) than stock options. When a company grants you RSUs, you're immediately responsible for tax on the value of the shares. If you then hold the stock for any period of time, and later sell at a profit, you'll need to pay tax on that profit too. You get taxed twice.
It was literally impossible for most holders to sell at the price when the Bitcoin Cash fork happened because none of the exchanges were accepting deposits. Part of the reason the price was so high then was exactly because people couldn't sell; it dropped as soon as deposits opened. (Since this happened at different times on different exchanges, the prices diverged quite a lot too.)
It's literally impossible for most holders of pre-ipo options to sell them, or their stock, but their tax bill is due the day the leave their employer, not the day that those options/stocks become liquid.
Surprise, tax law isn't fair. Surprise, nobody is looking to change that.
That's only if you store the full state of every block, which isn't necessary even for a full node. If you just keep a few recent block states, plus the entire transaction history, it's in the low tens of GB but you can still fully validate the entire chain history, and reconstruct the state of any block you want.
Segwit is used in a small fraction of transactions[0] and SegWit2x was cancelled. While the price has skyrocketed the actual transaction rate has barely moved[1].
Combined with the low transaction rate I would assume people don't care about Bitcoin as currency -- only as a rapidly appreciating asset. As long as the price keeps skyrocketing why would you ever spend any unless you had no other currency?
Not really. I have a bitcoin debit card. This essentially puts the money in my wallet into bitcoin. The way bitcoin has been doing over the past year, all it does is make everything reduce in price relative to the time I put the money in the wallet.
How can we count votes of people who don't have the money for a single transaction fee? I thought Bitcoin was supposed to be better because it was the cheapest?
You subsidize them then. Mining isn't free. Running a node isn't free. Bitcoin was never about being cheap, it's about protecting your purchasing power.
In April 2011 Roger Ver bought enough bitcoin to drive the price up from $1.89 to $3.30. His company was the first to accept Bitcoin for payment. He paid for the first radio and billboard advertisements for Bitcoin. He funded BitInstant, Blockchain.info, BitPay, Ripple, and Kraken. He helped found the Bitcoin foundation. He started an online store that accepted only bitcoin. He essentially became a spokesman for Bitcoin.
