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Does the IRS really want to you to track your capital gains on bitcoin every time you buy a sandwich or a sweater in the digital currency? After our analysis of the Internal Revenue Service guidelines on bitcoin, released in March, some people expressed surprise. They were amazed that the IRS could seriously be applying capital gains rules to something that the bitcoin community sees as a currency, and which in many cases uses as such. “This can’t be good for bitcoin”, said one commenter privately to Coindesk. ” If it’s not a currency, then how are you supposed to...

For Judges to judge, there must be a standard against which all actions are judged. The Book of Judges is preceded by Moses’ reiteration of the Torah just before the nation of Israel proceeds into the Promised Land. The law, the standard of righteousness by which Israel is to govern themselves as a people, is repeated and amplified one last time before the death of Moses. It is in this final instruction of Moses that we find the context to the Book of The Judges, which is a prophetic shadow picture of the day and hour in which we live.

A new report by researchers at ETH Zurich University in Switzerland has concluded that the now-bankrupt Japan-based bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox may have lost only 386 bitcoins ($203,000) due to issues stemming from transaction malleability. The finding provides new evidence that Mt. Gox’s continued claims that issues with the Bitcoin protocol were the primary reason for its insolvency are perhaps misleading or untrue. Released on 26th March, the report was authored by Christian Decker and Professor Roger Wattenhofer, both of the university’s Distributed Computing Group (DCG). Overall, the authors found that only 302,000 bitcoins could have ever been involved in...

Less than a week after a fake Chinese news report sent bitcoin and litecoin prices plummeting on some exchanges, another similar rumour hit the Internet today. News that the Chinese government would penalize any bank transacting with bitcoin exchanges after 15th April started to break around mid-morning China time on Thursday 27th March. This time, it was reported as fact by a number of news services. The bitcoin price, already on a downward trend, dropped to a low of $561.61 on CoinDesk’s BPI and below the $550 mark on Chinese exchanges. The latest report gave all the usual reasons a...

The US Internal Revenue Service finally announced its guidance for virtual currencies yesterday, explicitly referring to bitcoin (see the announcement here and notice here). The increased clarity – provided three weeks before the end of the US tax year - will come as a relief to many who were scared to get involved in bitcoin, commercially. But what does it mean for different members of the bitcoin community? US businesses wanting to get involved in bitcoin have been waiting for this for a while. As recently as January, US Taxpayer Advocate Nina Olson pressured the IRS in her annual report...

After less than three months consideration, the IRS has issued its statement clarifying th etax treatment of Bitcoins (and other virtual currencies) before the April 15th Deadline. The finding, summarized, is that Vitual currencies will be treated as property (not as a currency) which, as WSJ notes, means an investor who buys bitcoin would typically have a capital gain or loss when it’s sold. The price of Bitcoin is rising modestly on this news...

The CoinDesk team will be covering the sold out CoinSummit event in full. If you’ve not made it to San Francisco for the conference, you can still follow the action on CoinDesk’s Twitter feed (@CoinDesk), as well as watching the CoinSummit Live Stream.

It's not the managers who are incompetent, it's the organization itself that is incompetent. I received a number of interesting reader responses to my previous entries on the incompetence of the Federal Reserve and the Deep State: The Federal Reserve: Masters of the Universe or Trapped Incompetents? (March 21, 2014) Why Is Our Government (and Deep State) So Incompetent? (March 6, 2014) Some readers thought I was underestimating the power of these institutions to pursue essentially unlimited money-printing and related global strategies. While I understand the apparent power of unlimited money-printing and global Empire, my point (poorly articulated the first...

A man in Canada who was suspected of having Ebola has tested negative for viral hemorrhagic fevers, according to the World Health Organization and Canadian health officials. Viral hemorrhagic fevers is a generic term that refers to a number of diseases found in Africa, including Ebola hemorrhagic fever, Lassa fever, Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever and yellow fever, according to Denise Werker, deputy chief medical health officer at the Saskatchewan Ministry of Health. Testing on the man continues, WHO spokesman Gregory Hartl said in a tweet. "May be malaria. Will know today."

The Bitcoin Tipping Point is coming and it will be the Big Bang of disruption in financial services, money and payments as we know them! I often think about the “tipping-point” in Bitcoin’s journey to mass adoption and regularly as myself several questions. When will it be noticeable and what will trigger it? Has it already begun or if not, how far away are we? How do you define or measure “mass adoption” of Bitcoin? A bitcoin meme of Morpheus and Neo posted online recently got me thinking again about how Bitcoin’s true exit most likely itself. Once a significant...

As the Attorney General of these United States, Eric Holder is the top legal advisor for the entire nation. As such, he has been in a position to help punish financial criminals and the mega-banks for the crimes they committed in the run-up to the financial crisis, and the egregious looting thereafter. Despite his unique role, Eric Holder has spent the past five years taking absolutely zero action on any matter of national significance. In fact, his major claim to fame appears to be that he has solidified the creation of a group of untouchable criminals known as the “Too...

San Francisco-based mobile gift card app provider Gyft officially added US retail giant Walmart to its merchant network on 24th March. The company took to Twitter to release the news that the largest physical retailer in the US, which earned more than $325bn from its US retail stores in 2012, and garnered more than $460bn in sales worldwide that year, had been added to its service.

Auroracoin, the “cryptocurrency for Iceland”, will begin distributing auroracoins to the country’s citizens this week, starting tomorrow, 25th March. The distribution, which is being called Airdrop, will send 50% of the total auroracoins in circulation to the country’s populace. Icelandic residents that enter their permanent resident ID on auroracoin’s official website will receive 31.8 AUR (roughly $385 at press time). The fourth-place digital currency in terms of overall market cap, Auroracoin quickly rose to prominence even amongst the myriad of new digital currencies for its unique approach to community building. Further, as it climbed up the market cap leaderboard, auroracoin...

The Tera Group Inc. said Monday it had finalized the terms for a multi-million dollar bitcoin swap agreement between two U.S. institutions, but declined to name the parties involved. Such transactions are currently unregulated, Tera said. The company said it has reached out to the U.S. Commodities Futures Trading Commission in order to work on a regulated bitcoin swap. The CFTC hadn’t responded to a request for comment as of writing this post. “The goal is for us to bring this to the bitcoin community because there are many commercial entities that want to take bitcoin in but have concerns...

Suppose you were a committed leftist revolutionary who somehow got elected president of center-right America. Suppose you were great at making speeches, but little else. You masked your socialist agenda in the appealing rhetoric of fairness and justice, but secretly loathed the American system of constitutional government and free-market capitalism. Suppose you also had developed into a pathological narcissist with an absurdly grandiose view of yourself and almost no tolerance for criticism and disagreement. Suppose your ego was so fragile, your worldview so distorted, your mind so angry beneath your charismatic exterior, and your self-image of being a divinely gifted...

An Australian company says it has produced one of bitcoin’s holy grails: a cashless ATM that allows users to buy bitcoins using a credit card, and sell bitcoins via a direct deposit to their bank account. The first fully functional Diamond Circle ATM arrived from its manufacturer in Brisbane this week. Unlike competing ATMs and vending machines that rely on QR codes and cash, Diamond Circle’s solution is based on near-field communication (NFC) technology with paper receipt backups. This unique approach is the brainchild of CEO Stephen Rowlison, a seasoned FinTech (financial technology) entrepreneur with 30 years of IT experience...

The prophet David gave us an insightful overview of the Torah, “He made known His acts unto Israel – His ways unto Moses.” Moses pled for the Almighty to reveal Himself to him, so the Almighty moved Moses into the cleft of the rock and covered him with His hand as the glory of YHVH approached. Moses was only allowed to see Him after He passed by. So it is, that we are seldom allowed to see what He is doing – or going to do – but in “hindsight” we can see His “ways” that so profoundly affect our...

Cutting right to the chase: we don't think going short is a good idea yet. Just when you would think the situation with Mt. Gox couldn't get any stranger, it has. Apparently, the exchange "found" almost BTC 200,000 in one of its old wallets this month. The coins would be currently worth approximately $115 million. A statement published yesterday on the exchanges website reads: MtGox Co., Ltd. had certain old-format wallets which were used in the past and which, MtGox thought, no longer held any bitcoins. Following the application for commencement of a civil rehabilitation proceeding, these wallets were rescanned...

Notoriously tight-lipped bitcoin exchange and CoinDesk Bitcoin Price Index member BTC-e is now allowing customers to withdraw funds to Visa and MasterCard debit and credit cards, with some exceptions. The company blog post, issued on 21st March, indicated that the new program is now available to customers in any country, using any currency. All customers will pay a 5% fee for the service. The new functionality is noteworthy as it will allow customers to send money to debit and credit cards issued by two of the largest and most commonly used international card issuers. At present, the transfer of funds...

A new report suggests that Mt. Gox, the now-bankrupt Japan-based exchange said to have lost 850,000 BTC in customer funds may actually still be in possession of 200,000 BTC ($118m at press time). The news, published by Yahoo Japan, allegedly comes from the exchange’s bankruptcy lawyer who suggests the bitcoins were found on 7th March in a wallet used by Mt. Gox prior to June 2011. The 200,000 bitcoins would equate to just over 23% of the entirety of the funds presumed lost by the company in the wake of widespread theft that is said to have occurred on the...