The whole bitcoin as a tax evasion tool sort of myth

[notig]

Okay let me clarify. There are some taxes that will be easily avoided with bitcoins... and some that won't. This is good. It means bitcoin can cooperate with the government.


First lets give an example of what taxes you can mostly avoid with bitcoins: Death tax might be easier since you can just send unknown funds to relatives. Inflation tax. Right now a lot of money is printed to finance the government. With bitcoins this inflation tax is somewhat mitigated(your salary is still affected and such)


But here is where things won't change. Already it's up to companies to collect taxes. Just because cash is "anonymous" doesn't somehow mean when you walk into a store and pay with cash they won't charge you taxes on that. They would get caught easily. So in the future if bitcoins are accepted at companies they will charge tax just like dollars.  Currently online transactions require the individual to report the tax purchases... so this doesn't change anything. If they someday require companies to collect taxes from people and try to kill internet trade.... well then you will be paying taxes with bitcoins too. If a company decides to pay you a salary then they will also report it and comply with laws because they will get caught if they don't.

In fact bitcoin might even make it easier for the government to do certain things. Imagine if they said to a company to use a certain public bitcoin address for their revenue? It would be completely transparent. They could watch transaction and verify and audit everything so easily it's not even funny.

Property taxes are another example of one you aren't going to avoid with bitcoin. They will still be there.

So thoughts?

[nobbynobbynoob]

Bitcoin is a tax-evasion tool the way that cash is a tax-evasion tool.

[NikolaTesla]

This thread deserves an award.

There has also been semi-serious discussion in the US of switching over to a value-added tax to replace income tax and how that would actually generate more revenue for the federal government. This would arguably be easier to collect with Bitcoin since the records are kept automatically by the network. Very little bookkeeping and accounting is needed on the merchant's end; it's all just part of the blockchain.