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Bitcoin United States

Crypto Firms Brace for New Tax-Reporting Rules to IRS (bloomberg.com) 47

The Biden administration is poised to specify which cryptocurrency firms will be forced to report reams of customer data to the Internal Revenue Service, Bloomberg News reported Friday. From the report: The Treasury Department is planning to issue preliminary guidance this month clarifying who will be considered a crypto broker under legislation that Congress passed last year, said the people who asked not to be named before a public announcement. The initial move would later be followed by a more formal rule proposal, the people said. Treasury officials declined to comment. The provision on crypto brokers was included in 2021's sweeping infrastructure bill. The tag matters because it carries a range of disclosure requirements such as reporting customers' names and addresses, gross proceeds from sales, and any capital gains or losses to both the IRS and investors. Industry groups have argued the definition included in the law was so broad that it could pull in miners, stakers and software providers who don't have access to such information. They've warned that unless Treasury comes up with a narrower interpretation, many firms won't be able to comply, stifling innovation and pushing crypto jobs outside the U.S.
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Crypto Firms Brace for New Tax-Reporting Rules to IRS

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  • Rotten government (Score:5, Insightful)

    by backslashdot ( 95548 ) on Friday January 07, 2022 @01:54PM (#62152547)

    Anytime we are having fun, the rotten government wants to come spoil the party. Stay the fuck out of it! Crypto is not the governments business! It is pure theft for the government to get involved in these affairs which is simply not any of its business. Government has no fear of people, that is not right, is it? That any man feels they can act with impunity?

    • Congratulations, you sound like the mob. You can't avoid taxes and death so stop trying.
      • you can avoid tax to a certain extent. Though with crypto it involves moving to Puerto Rico, or relinquishing your citizenship and moving outside the US.
        Neither one is a great option unless you have a lot sunk into it, and if it's over 2M they'll want their share anyhow if you relinquish your citizenship.

      • by pla ( 258480 )
        Taxes on what, exactly?

        As the haters are so quick to point out, crypto isn't money. Until an exchange occurs between crypto and fiat (or something meaningfully measurable in fiat), Uncle Sam has absolutely no say in the matter.

        Or to put that another way, taxing bitcoin is the single most legitimizing action the government could take as regards crypto. And if crypto is legit, fiat... Isn't.

        And yes, for the record I fully realize we technically owe taxes even on bartered goods and services. Unless y
        • Taxes on what, exactly?

          Don't be a derpy idiot. Capital gains tax.

          • by pla ( 258480 )
            Yep, we 100% agree that's how to report realized gains or losses. Now name another capital asset (HUD forms and excise tax notwithstanding, obviously) that you're taxed on receipt rather than just on disposition.

            I have no idea how that's even supposed to work, and I'm seriously trying to stay legal (a few grand a year isn't worth prison time). Neither Schedule D nor 8949 make a lick of sense unless you have a value for the "Proceeds" column - Which you don't have unless you've sold something. And sure,
    • Crypto is a scam so therefore is the government business. Or,
      Crypto is an investments so therefore is the government business. Or
      Or its money, so it WILL BE government business
    • Re:Rotten government (Score:4, Informative)

      by Baconsmoke ( 6186954 ) on Friday January 07, 2022 @02:04PM (#62152591)
      Um how is it rotten? If you live in a country that has taxation and you make money, you have to pay taxes on that. Regardless of how you made the money it is still an income and will be treated as such. If you don't want things like Interstates, GPS, NOAA, NASA, a military, and a few thousand other things then you might want to move to a country that doesn't have those things I guess. But if you live here then you take advantage of these things and they have to be paid for somehow.
      • Oh I do not mind paying for those services, even though I dont want or need many of them. Just make me pay a fee for those services instead of forcing them upon me. Divide the governments budget by 300 million and I will pay that amount as a fee.

        • Ah, the old flat tax BS.

          Please explain why people below the poverty level who are barely scraping by should pay the same amount of taxes that you make when they literally have no money to spare? And why billionaires should pay no more taxes than someone who lives below the poverty level?

          • Why should someone pay more than they owe? If you want to people to pay based on what is fair, we should price milk based on that too. Let us go further, why not adjust the price based on how much of a nice guy someone is? Why should good people have to pay the same price as a bad person?

        • See, the way it works is, you want a flat tax, and I want a 90% rate on the rich, and since we can't do both, we have to elect representatives to vote on what the rates will be on different things.

          And they didn't choose your system. So stop crying and eat your sour grapes. Pay your fucking taxes and quit whining about it, bitch.

      • By my calculation, every able bodied adult owes 35,000 dollars a year to the government. Now a big chunk of that is actually covered by customs duties and other treasury earnings but I dont feel like accounting for that. So anyway, why not just charge everyone $35,000? Anyone who cannot afford that, which is I suspect a vast majority of people, should work off whatever amount they owe by performing a service for the government. And yes there is some service everyone even unskilled can do, whether it is help

        • The things you are mentioning are all the things that you get tax deductions for doing.
          faming gets huge subsidies.
          providing housing- not only is there section 8, but you get to write off depreciation on your property, and expenses associated with it. Most times leaving you with income that is tax free (after tax benifits).
          construction companies get huge contract's to build the roads and do maintenance, which then provide jobs to thousands of people.

        • A full time minimum wage is about $15k per year. You've just given all those people an extra $20k to work off. Instead of 40 hours a week, they now get to work 93.5 hours per week, over 13 hours per day, 7 days per week, for no extra money whatsoever.

          Your calculations are inhumane and only a complete psychopath wouldn't see the problems with what you're proposing. It would literally work people to death.

      • The US wants it's cut even if you don't live in the US! It's one of 2 countries that tax the worldwide income of anyone fortunate or unfortunate enough to be a citizen.

        • Feel free to renounce your citizenship.

          No taxes to pay, and no US Government to back you anywhere in the world you may go.

          • by pla ( 258480 )
            That's not possible to do at the moment. [theguardian.com]

            And it was fairly difficult even before the pandemic. It's like getting divorced from the judge overseeing the divorce itself, and goes down pretty much exactly the way you'd expect.
            • You have to be a bit of an idiot to seek information about American bureaucrat procedures from the British press. That article is full of specious "mistakes."

            • yeah, everything I've heard on it makes it sound like you really need to plan for it before your net worth goes over $2M, or if you are an expat that just doesn't want to file taxes or deal with the expense of filing taxes every year for the US and report all your banking 2x a year.

          • I don't know that what your saying is a bad thing. no US government to back you anywhere in the world is every other country in the world.
            All but the US and 1 other say, if you're not living within their boarders, they won't tax you.
            I would think most people in Europe think their it's not all that bad, and I can think of a few asian countries that aren't all that bad either.

            for me though, I don't have a lot of motivation to do that. The US tax code lets me write off most of my taxable income.

      • Um how is it rotten? If you live in a country that has taxation and you make money, you have to pay taxes on that.

        Well, one of the problems is...the govt is categorizing crypto wrongly.

        From what I understand, they often treat it like you're selling a stock every time you convert from one crypto to another....like you're realized a real world gain which you haven't.

        For instance, if you have bitcoin and convert it to etherium....they charge you capital gains tax on the "sale" of bit coin as you convert it

        • Those are gains! If I trade one stock for another stock, it is the same. You executed a trade, and have realized gains.

          You just don't want to pay your taxes, because you're an asshole, so you spew this bullshit. And while I know you're an idiot, you're not too stupid to comprehend what "realized gains" means.

          Bartering different financial instruments in no way changes the tax implications. It is the same as selling them. And you already knew that.

          Stop lying about what the issue is.

          • Well, that's the thing...crypto isn't stocks.

            This is more akin to exchanging your US dollars for Euros or something.

            You don't generally have to pay cap gains taxes when just exchanging currencies and that's more what exchanging crypto is akin to.

      • But if you gamble on crypto and lose everything, you ain't getting shit out of the government. But please, IRS, do take more of my money for illegal wars and spying!
    • Anytime we are having fun, the rotten government wants to come spoil the party

      If you don't want the government interfering in your party, then when these firms get hacked or run away with your money the govnerment won't help you. You're on your own. That means all those millions of crypto we hear about being stolen each week will be just that, lost. You can't go and ask them to track down the thieves.

      It is pure theft for the government to get involved in these affairs which is simply not any of its busine

      • Anytime we are having fun, the rotten government wants to come spoil the party

        If you don't want the government interfering in your party, then when these firms get hacked or run away with your money the govnerment won't help you. You're on your own. That means all those millions of crypto we hear about being stolen each week will be just that, lost. You can't go and ask them to track down the thieves.

        this has happened before, think Mt. Gox. Where is the government to save the day? I lost what today would be 100's of thousands there, but haven't seen any effort of any government to swoop in and save the day, nor do I want them to.

        It is pure theft for the government to get involved in these affairs which is simply not any of its business.

        The reason the government gets involved in these affairs is for what I just stated. It's the same reaon the SEC was created: to establish a uniform set of rules businesses involved in financial transactions and their customers must abide by. It's why insider trading is illegal, or why companies must provide statements to their customers and why licensing is required.

        However, if you don't want that, if you want to have fly-by-night operations taking your money and you not having any recourse to recover your money, have it. The rest of us will sit back and laugh at you when you're crying you lost your money.

        Oh wait. You just don't want to pay taxes on your "gains" or want to continue to launder money. Never mind. Carry on.

        the SEC is also the group that keeps small investors out of more secure investments backed by assets, claiming they are not sophisticated enough to be able to make a good decision unless they have a net worth of over $1M or earn over $250K/yr.

    • Crypto is not the governments business!

      It is not. But buying and selling crypto for real money sure is.

      Pay your taxes.

    • but just in case you are, the crypto markets are over $1 trillion. The government absolutely has an interest in making sure they're safe, secure and free from criminal activity.

      Never mind the money laundering, when a market gets that large the risk of collapse impacting people not directly involved because a real risk. If a bunch of rich ding-dongs put money into crypto and lose it they're gonna be looking to make that money back. Usually they own businesses, and if they need money fast liquidating them
    • Pay your taxes.

  • by 3seas ( 184403 ) on Friday January 07, 2022 @03:11PM (#62152817) Homepage Journal

    there's now an IRS gun-toting Sherriff in town.

    Just don't kill the deputy.

  • by PPH ( 736903 ) on Friday January 07, 2022 @03:24PM (#62152865)

    'Reams' being the correct term here. Stand by while we load the paper bin and install a new ribbon in the dot-matrix printer.

    Worse yet, it's all hand-written entries in a ledger. Scrawled by the accountant with Parkinson's disease.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    This story is a bit worse than it may seem at first:

    The IRS already considers every trade a taxable event, even if it's between two cryptocurrencies.

    So, consider someone who's into automated trading. One trading bot operating with one stake currency such as Tether/USDT can generate hundreds or even thousands of trades, and hence taxable events, in a month, even if you don't actually make much money in the process (as may be the case when the markets are bad, like they are right now). Here's a typical exam

    • by Nkwe ( 604125 )

      Here's a typical example of how things work when using a bot:

      * buy Tether with dollars from your bank or credit card
      * trade Tether for BTC
      * trade the BTC for Tether
      * trade Tether for Doge
      * trade the Doge for Tether
      * trade Tether for Litecoin
      * trade the Litecoin for Tether
      * sell the Tether for dollars back to your bank

      You only directly made two transactions, .

      If you were trading stocks or other securities or assets, they would all be separate transactions. Why should it be different with crypto tokens? If they were funds inside a tax deferred retirement account (401k, HSA, etc.) you could potentially report at the account level at time of distribution, but for regular brokerage accounts, you need to report at the security level. I don't see why crypto would be different.

    • You're confused about the implications of a "taxable event."

      As a stock trader, let me fill you in.

      If I trade a whole bunch of times during the day, and break even, there were a whole bunch of taxable events, but I don't owe any net capital gains taxes.

      Same for crypto. So that's not a real problem. There are only two issues here: 1) People who didn't pay their taxes on crypto gains are scared that their data will be reported to the IRS and they'll get in trouble for not reporting and 2) Whiners who don't wan

  • 600 bucks at a time...

    Is why we should vote for democrats?

  • Discouraging crypto-crap is a feature as far as I'm concerned, not a bug.

    Cryptocurries are a planet-roasting, mostly fraudulent, Waste Of Money, Brains, And Time.

  • Okay, taxing mining profits who are clearly a business, or long term investors, who are ... investors are okay.

    But this will also kill people trying to buy stuff on Newegg, or even a pizza with their crypto wallets.

    "You paid $48 for that dinner as $DOGE coin. Sure, but it was $47 when you bought it, so pay us income tax on the $1" would be on every other transaction. The ones you lose? They are most likely "wash" sales you need to keep track, for many years.

    The additional paperwork and taxation will make su

  • Ok so if the new rules means the IRS will already know my capitol chains then I won’t have to report anything right? I don’t understand why, when the government and IRS already know how much I owe it they owe me, I’d have to do anything at all. Just me a bill or a check you lazy fucks.

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