bitcoin

dan at geer.org dan at geer.org
Sun Jan 26 11:22:41 PST 2014


 | Obvious solutions:
 | 
 | * declare BTC to be presumptively evidence of drug dealing or trading CP
 | - possession of weakly-related artefacts being declared as sufficient
 | evidence has, IIRC, been ruled legal in NY in the case of a law which
 | made possession by a woman of multiple condoms evidence of prostitution.
 | * require BTC holdings to be declared to the tax authorities, and make
 | explicit that whatever the local tax on investment holdings applies to
 | BTC (I think the current question is not whether growth in value of BTC
 | is taxable but what kind of investment it should be taxed as).
 | * snarl up BTC exchanges with the same reporting requirements as normal
 | banks and trading houses, even though the much smaller scale will make
 | that extremely difficult to comply with.
 | * rule that BTC miners are engaging in banking by building up the record
 | in the block chain, and make them all responsible for reporting the
 | transactions they process


We have proof by demonstration of item #2 in the Commodity Futures
Exchange Commission driving prediction markets like Intrade and
Banc de Binary out of business.

[Those of us who see a regulation as a tax-by-another-name are thus
again reminded that the power to tax is the power to destroy.]

--dan




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