I thought Bitcoin was supposed to be a digital currency. https://t.co/Vi1LfTyeVO
— Jeff Fecke (@jkfecke) November 7, 2021
From the ‘probably too good to be true’ files:
In the business of creating/reselling #NFTs ?
Get used to filing Form 8300, and obtaining social security numbers and identification of your buyers. https://t.co/9A8xCgwTNO
— James Yochum, CPA (@JTheAccountant) November 6, 2021
For those not following the other thread this is in regards to $10,000 “cash” reporting requirements you file with Form 8300. Digital Assets are Cash now in 6050i
Also just not lump sum pmts it can be aggregate over the year, and you get to keep track when you hit it ? pic.twitter.com/0r105nZAht
— James Yochum, CPA (@JTheAccountant) November 6, 2021
I’mma take a wild-arse guess that this is 65% ‘Congress must be seen to be doing something about this new tax loophole’, 30% ‘Al Capone control’ (overt criminals using ransomware or peddling drugs / slaves / guns will be targeted), and 5% ‘fvck these sweaty nerds for being really really annoying’. But feel free to tell me where I’m wrong… or to share your own speculation…
"Bitcoin will replace fiat! It's money!"
"Okay we'll treat it like money for regulatory purposes."
"Noooo! Bitcoin is a digital asset, not cash!"
— Jeff Fecke (@jkfecke) November 7, 2021
— Ron (@ronfromsandiego) November 8, 2021
Poe Larity
Ha ha!
Winston
I don’t use cash at all.
Bank deposit SSA digital.
Bank pays all my bills digital.
My purchases with credit card digital.
More digital the better. (I pay a guy to mow my yard with cash tho.)
Edmund Dantes
There’s a lot of shit the IRS should be going after. Glad to see this crackdown. Hope to see more in the charity, educational, non profit outfits sector that Dems let themselves get browbeaten out of the IRS enforcing the rules on political activity.
Urza
Good
jnfr
I’m probably 99% digital, in the sense of doing our banking online. But I still prefer the currency I know has some government backing.
Rusty
Good, and I hope it’s just the beginning of reigning in the ongoing scam (and environmental damaging) cryptocurrency, NFT, Blockchain!, Blockchain!, Blockchain! etc. mess. How terrible that something created to allow for criminal activity and to allow for tax evasion is going to be subject to the same rules as everything else. The horror!
Tony Gerace
@Rusty: Aside from the criminal activity, and aside from the fact that that an enormous amount of coal is being burned thereby dumping carbon into the atmosphere in order to “mine” this make-believe currency … I just hate these pasty, arrogant libertarian jerks. I look forward to them whining and crying about this (and maybe moving to one of Peter Thiel’s floating Pacific islands). Good luck catching your own fish and desalinizing see water to stay alive, bro’s!
Steeplejack
@Winston:
For some reason I long resisted “use a card for everything,” but the pandemic moved me away from cash. I still tend to pay cash at restaurants, especially the tip, because I don’t trust management not to screw the waiter. Today after my shots I paid my lunch bill with a card but gave the waitress a cash tip.
ETA: All my bills I pay on line. I write two or three checks a year. My dentist gives a discount if you pay with a check (or cash) instead of a card. Go figure.
Fair Economist
If I’m reading this correctly, it doesn’t apply to transactions between individuals that aren’t part of normal business. Since theoretically that’s what’s crypto is for, it could be much less of an issue than it seems. My understanding is that most is currently transacted through brokers, and they’ll have to report, but that could be changed.
NotMax
@Tony Gerace
Floating island. Yum.
;)
Major Major Major Major
As I recall, this version of the provision (Ron Johnson’s I believe) is in fact sorta bad, mostly because it isn’t based in a real understanding of… anything… so it’s both overbroad and unworkable. Ron Wyden had the correct version all worked out but the amendment failed. Don’t have the details on me, I might have written about it here though.
ETA yeah, here it is. This requirement applies to miners and intermediaries that don’t do any transacting (as you or I understand the concept) so it may well just flop. Always listen to Wyden when regulating the internet. https://www.rollcall.com/2021/08/04/wyden-led-amendment-would-clarify-cryptocurrency-reporting-rules/
And like, the IRS can’t bill you if they can’t identify you, so for all practical purposes this only applies to people who trade crypto in broad daylight, do NFTs under their real name, cash out through Coinbase and such.
Jim Appleton
Nine years of drier lint as NFT.
How’s the IRS going to come at me?
ian
@Major Major Major Major:
IANAL, but that sounds like the way to get out of paying taxes on this is called fraud.
Winston
@Steeplejack: Same. Benefit is my credit cards give me cash back so I harvest some money on that. Made a big haul charging my dental bill (like $160).
Winston
@Major Major Major Major: So I (think) I always see crypto valued in terms of dollars. I may be wrong because I have no idea about who exchanges crypto for dollars or if it is actually necessary as you spend your crypto. So people dealing in crypto receive it like cash and spend it like cash, right?
Ascap_scab
I have heard there is a cap on Bitcoin. After a certain amount (21 Billion) have been ‘mined’, no new Bitcoins go into circulation. If mining stops, no blockchain verification continues after that, which means the whole thing collapses.
Tell me how all of these ‘digital currencies’ are not Ponzi schemes.
Winston
@Winston: I don’t see how crypto could ever be an advantage to me. I don’t pay taxes (SSA is only income). I don’t sex traffic, sell or do drugs, etc. I just get older. Sometimes I go 47 mph in a 45 zone. Last year the cops pulled me over for easing thru a four way stop but let me go after seeing what an old fart I was.
Winston
@Winston: In my defense, there was a storm coming on and I just wanted to beat it home. It hit about the time the cops were sick of detaining me because they really didn’t want to stand outside my window in the rain. Florida, you know. Rains every day in the summer.
Winston
I see Stargate SG1 is on netflix. Off to watch it again. See y’all in a couple weeks.
satby
Boy, overnight threads have really died around here. Wonder why?
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
@Steeplejack: That’s so the dentist doesn’t have to pay the transaction fee cards charge businesses when someone uses a CR card. I often still write checks for local businesses so they can avoid the charge.
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
@Winston: Yeah, my favorite CR card is associated with Amazon, and I get credit on Amazon from what I charge. Ends up paying for some of what I buy from Amazon.
NotMax
@satby
You betcha. Where are all the insomniacs?
;)
SiubhanDuinne
@NotMax:
Right here ?
ETA: I woke up at 1:30. Now, at 5:00 am, will try to grab another couple of hours.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@satby: Cole didn’t get the blog it’s jab, it caught the ‘rona.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@SiubhanDuinne: My sleep patterns have been off since I got my booster, or maybe it’s the time change…
NotMax
@SiubhanDuinne
Rock ‘n’ Roll Lullaby.
;)
satby
@A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan): The transact fees are minor and certainly was less than losing the business entirely because you don’t accept cards. Millennials will pay for a two dollar purchase with their debut cards, they seldom carry cash.
Yutsano
@Edmund Dantes: Nice thought. Here’s another: the IRS is woefully underfunded. Like the last increase in our budget got us up to where we should have been in 2010. And the division you’re talking about got it worst. It’s so small now that it operates out of one office in Cincinnati*. Only some very specific offices operate with such a small footprint. You want enforcement? Demand that Congress increase the budget of the IRS. And I don’t mean by just percentage increments. I’m talking at least a doubling with an emphasis on Tax Exempt/Government Entities (the division you’re talking about) and let them have teeth again. Trust me there are quite a few churches that need to be torched based on their blatant political activity alone. You want that to happen you need to pay the regulators who can make it happen.
*Tbh I’m not sure what side of the river they’re on. Half the offices that are in Cincinnati are in Florence, KY.
satby
@SiubhanDuinne: I woke up at 2:30 and just never went back to sleep, so I got up. I’m planning on a nap later.
satby
@Yutsano: No lie told! Hope you’re feeling better.
prostratedragon
@NotMax: Around. Just no longer keeping the world from collapsing by force of will.
NotMax
@satby
Had a refreshing after dinner snooze from 9:30 to 11:30 p.m.. Surprised I wasn’t jolted awake sooner, because something in my back got thrown out of whack on Monday afternoon and it’s been Twinge City since.
Yutsano
@satby: I woke up around 0200 PST but didn’t feel like taking another sleeping pill. It’s now 0300 and my natural tiredness has kicked in. Until later in the morning mes amis!
Soprano2
@A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan): The nail salon I go to charges a $1.25 fee if you use a card, but if you use Venmo or Cash App there’s no charge. I figure as time goes on we’ll see more of this as small businesses try to avoid transaction fees. They can be steep – some months we pay almost $1,000. We recently upgraded our POS system so we can use the chip – that’s supposed to save us money, and we needed to do it anyway. Thanks, Restaurant Revitalization Fund!
Chris Johnson
@Yutsano: You’re preaching to the choir here: I’m all for it. So many bad actors cheating like hell on their taxes. One way to rein in sociopathic monsters is to grab them by the sociopathy: they’ll always fight taxes with insane abandon and if you let them do that, they’ve got all the more money to do all the other monstrous shit they want to do.
cmorenc
@Winston:
Only a matter of time before your neighborhood youth who cuts your lawn for $ has one of those pocket-size cc readers that attaches to his iPhone.
Wilson Heath
Always was income, always was required to be reported, at minimum on the 1040. IRC section 61 is a harsh mistress. Willful failure to report income gets you into the criminal provisions.
Now the whistleblower provisions of IRC section 7623 are sweet. For the whistleblower and the nation. So rat out your brother-in-law for satisfaction and profit!
Steeplejack (phone)
@A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan):
I get that. I don’t understand why more businesses don’t do it. My oral surgeon, for example, didn’t have that option when I had a tooth extracted last month.
Ohio Mom
@Steeplejack: My dentist does too — as well as the periodontist.
I think the discount isn’t really a discount, it’s more like if you use your credit card, you are penalized the amount of the service fee the dentist will be charged.
But calling what they do a “discount” sounds better than “Are you sure you want to whip out that credit card, there’s a penalty for that.”
Pharniel
Foone (old school tech person) breaks down how this kills the NFT scam – because the NFT scam is literally a variant of the Gold Block scheme with The Blockchain filling in for The Expert, who is viewed as 100% trustworthy because it’s public to all.
Which means that the IRS has complete access to all information about NFTs, because they are on the blockchain, and open to all. So once someone keeps selling things for $5-10k a pop and it has the same origination point and that totals millions of dollars – whelp, they’re going to start looking for that wallet owner.
As for anonymity – there have been numerous examples of people being identified from the blockchain. You’re anonymous from an individual trying to find you, turns out, not so much against State Actors.
Major Major Major Major
@Pharniel: this assumes the IRS has the time and resources to track down lots of wallet owners (and, because the law is poorly written, the people who verified the transactions, any intermediaries, and the wallet providers).
Major Major Major Major
@ian: yes but they have to catch you and don’t have the resources.
@Winston: it’s commonly shown valuated in dollars because if I just told you the number of ethereum in a Bitcoin you wouldn’t be able to make sense of it. It only *becomes* dollars when you exchange it for dollars through a service like Coinbase. And that’s exactly where the government is going to look; anywhere else is hard.