20 comments

[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 58.7 ms ] thread
Question (that I won't interpret as tax advice. I have no crypto positions to my knowledge): do crypto to stablecoin transactions incur taxes equivalent to liquidating securities to cash?

Because if not, that sounds like a massive tax gap that should probably be addressed.

For US persons, all crypto trades, including crypto to crypto, including to stablecoins, are reportable capital tax events.

This was clarified in the 2017 tax reform, and the IRS has also said it applies pre-2017 (pre-2017 law is totally worth challenging but its much lower value involved so its history).

I know plenty of people, including their CPAs, that get this wrong. Mostly because they never had to handle taxes themselves before, but they imagine things like only paying taxes when dollars hit their bank account, a wild abstraction that is saying the crypto exchange financial institution is ignorable for taxes and all their onchain data is ignorable for taxes.

Nice, thanks. Yeah, the few crypto events I had were thankfully much simpler and easily handled in re: taxes, so this was always an open question for me.
It's quite obvious that none of the people pumping this stuff on Reddit etc. are paying any of these taxes. And the IRS doesn't have the resources to hunt all or even more than a fraction of them.

(Fun question to upset everyone: suppose you, along with some other people, own an ownership/control token in a DAO. The DAO makes some trades on your behalf. Who incurs what tax liability?)

I would treat them as board seats in a foundation (orphaned entity) taxed at the entity level, and the entity is non-US

As governance tokens aren’t equity, and there is nothing to pass through

Either way, there would be enough board seats OR shareholders from different places to dilute ownership to ensure there was no subpart f income

bearer board seats, even better than bearer shares. Crypto is immediately picking up the baton after all that energy was used to jettison bearer shares off the planet over the prior two decades.

Absolutely. All crypto exchanges from one to another are considered property exchanges where you have to recognize a gain. In contrast, I believe major currencies which are recognized as such have some favorable treatment so that if you are just a traveler who goes to England you aren’t on the hook because the GBP goes up vs USDbut don’t take that as tax advice.
Equivalent to securities yes, but equivalent to stocks no. Wash trades are allowed.
So, equivalent to forex?
(comment deleted)
YC startup Cointracker is a terrific tool to take the pain out of archaic crypto taxation: https://www.cointracker.io/

Sure, it's dumb to renew my Notes software and have that be a taxable event but...not my problem anymore :)

Oh, great. The banking industry is getting “tough on crypto” by helping themselves.

The Bank of Japan and the large banks in Japan operate one giant, corrupt, stupid oligarchy. It’s the insane incompetence of these entities, and witnessing it first-hand, that made me realize that non-bank crypto/digital currencies and stores of value are going to end up winning. Living in a first-world country with a third-world banking system has been an absolute eye-opener.

Don’t buy the hype — this is all about helping a bunch of entities that have done very little to serve the needs of the people whose tax revenue directly subsidizes their elaborate racket. The worst part is, these large Japanese banks aren’t just a domestic problem: outside of their borders, they’re some of the largest financiers of environmental destruction in the world (palm oil plantations, coal mines, etc) because they know the Japanese media will never tell the public what they’re up to.

It’s almost as though these global regulators and banks are hoping for massive systemic risk and failure in crypto, so they can step in and “save the world.” And, judging from 90% of the comments in these sorts of articles on HN, the “enlightened” public will cheer them on as they do it.

The problem is the amount of crime one could do with a fake stablecoin. Maybe you re right and the central bank of Japan (that has nothing to do with the banking industry) is criminal. But it doesn't change that stablecoins must be audited.

What if Tether was relying on a Bahamas bank created by the writer of inspector gadget ? That d be quite worrying to let them continue saying it's all safe and real, no?

When you’re a regulator, it’s often useful to allow things to grow into giant systemic failure so you have greater latitude to “fix things” when the time is right. As Sarbanes-Oxley demonstrated, the fix is often worse than the problem, and can hold economies back by decades (and if you study the history of some of the greatest fallen economies, such as in Old China, you will see that it can trigger permanent decline).

The anti-crypto people on here are as annoying as the “social networking websites are not worth hundreds of millions of dollars” were in the early 2000s.

This is a false comparison: everything new has opponents (everything has opponents, even loving a girl, laughing at jokes or shaking your hair in some places), so yes ofc there are people who said social networks wouldnt find a business model without being predatory as there are people now saying crypto cant serve a purpose without lying.

That doesn't remove from you the duty to explain why we should allow giant cons for the sake of trying someth. It's not like stocks of public companies, which were half scams half building railways. I d argue here crypto is not helping build railways :(

Oh and it's harder to lose all your saving on a speculative frenzy with social medias, so I d say we need to be more cautious this time.

> The Bank of Japan and the large banks in Japan operate one giant, corrupt, stupid oligarchy.

Boy when you find out how Tether and the crypto markets operate, you're going to be pretty disappointed.

Somehow they've managed to create a more corrupt and stupider oligopoly by all measures.

Make no mistake central banks themselves aren't threatened by all this. What they are, is by charter, responsible for managing the fall-out. The charter of central banks tends to be to manage the money supply to create a low and predictable rate of inflation over medium timeframes - and to maximize employment. If enough people tank the economy by buying Paolo's Bahamian Funbucks, the broader economy can in fact suffer and it will then cause the central banks to have to step in to carry out their mandates. Just like 2008.

> It’s the insane incompetence of these entities, and witnessing it first-hand, that made me realize that non-bank crypto/digital currencies and stores of value are going to end up winning.

This is just tinfoil hat economics. Citation needed.

And remember, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Amusing, the more I think and learned about how modern money works the less I am worried about the idea of bank oligarchy. In fact, things are very obvious, certain events in the past were inevitable. Even more events in the future are inevitable.

For example, we are in what amounts to be a "silent" depression. If we were on a gold standard we would have had a great depression again, instead, our modern money system lets us sustain a mortal wound and let us get away with limping at a snails pace.

What kind of reforms would be necessary to get out of this mess? Ah, yes, the abolishment of the nominal 0% interest rate on cash.

What does the cryptocurrency community do? They double down on massive speculation. They are stuck in the past.

>It’s almost as though these global regulators and banks are hoping for massive systemic risk and failure in crypto,

Nah, the regulators create ineffective rules, the banks game them as systemic risk is highly profitable if there is an even greater entity that bails them out.

Is it because nearly every stablecoin is in USD and none so far are in JPY? Safety obviously isn’t the reason they’re restricting USD stablecoins because you can invest in CumRocketCoins, SquidGameTokens, and ShibaInuTokens still there.
The risk is of course that the price action driving people into these speculative manias is created through ersatz dollars.

Kill the stablecoins, kill the valuations, kill the manias, stop the madness. Or at least help, anyways.

I don't intended to create FUD but there's a scandal on Tether that is waiting to explode.