IRS will make you disclose cryptocurrency on newest tax forms

FOXBusiness ^ | dec 19 2020 | Vandana Rambaran

[BiglyCommentary]

I think a lot of wealthy Chinese are using bitcoin to get cash out of the country.

[dila813]

True, tell that to the feds

[palmer]

Absolutely. Some Chinese tried leaving with cash or gold and wound up in jail. But all they have to do is waste some electricity on mining hardware, or find an anonymous exchange, then leave the country with a round trip ticket and a private key which is trivial to smuggle.

[Texas Fossil]

I have this problem with modern electronics, modern engineering and functionality.

I’m convinced that the best design is the simplest design possible. It means reliability and ease of operation.

Computer programmers today never had to struggle with memory capacity. They are convinced that there are no problems they cannot solve that a couple of extra layers of abstraction won’t fix. Failed idea in my mind.

The complexity of cars, computers and appliances today is insane. It is done to make money on your data, not to be functional. I hate that.

[familyop]

"What use is bitcoin if it can be publicly watched and tracked?"

Some kinds of transactions are easier and less costly, especially some international transactions.

"If not for the public-ness of bitcoin, how would the IRS know about the transaction at all?"

There are more old fashioned ways. One example would be self-reporting on either end. For example, An audited buyer writes off a purchase exposing the seller's income. Another example might be that of an agent buying something from a criminal seller and exposing the seller to the IRS.

[palmer]

Yep. The biggest problem is "programmers" can now cut and paste some code and a giant dependencies file and have a "working" solution with virtually no idea of what they have created. It will have bugs including purposefully inserted vulnerabilities and they will have no idea.

I also hate how brew on my mac automatically updates all the packages I have installed to new versions with supposed bug fixes but will undoutedly introduce new bugs. They decided to tackle compatability problems by always updating everything. I use some giant packages with lots of dependencies and things break anyway since it's basically hopeless to keep up unless you compile everything from source (which is difficult too).

Can I complain about one more thing? Big stupid data. The idea that simply adding more more more data will improve performance. In many cases it makes systems more brittle.

[cymbeline]

“One example would be self-reporting on either end ...”

Hadn’t thought of that. Thanks!

What’s an example of when use of Bitcoin would be advantageous.

[Texas Fossil]

Yes. Garbage in = Garbage out

[familyop]

"What’s an example of when use of Bitcoin would be advantageous."

I'm not very knowledgeable about it, really, and have only begin to study cryptocurrencies off an on. Using the following keywords in a search engine (like duckduckgo.com) might give you a better array of answers from various viewpoints.

why use cryptocurrency?