Do NOT declare that you have ever owned bitcoins

[Mike Christ]

How can a nation tell who's using crypto currency? Isn't there a level of anonymity that will make it cumbersome trying to pinpoint who to tax?

Right now there is a debate about a law to make internet service give goverment information about what are people watching on internet.

Anyway, nobody wants this law, but it is been debated. Thought it was a democracy, am I wrong?

A democracy is just a front; really, you elect a few jerkoffs to decide how you live your life, and most of them are jerking each other off already.  If CISPA passes into law, there should be no doubt in anyone's mind that the government is actively working against its citizens (though many of us already know this to be the case), and I doubt people will put up with it for long.

You know the straw that broke the camel's back?  CISPA might be that straw.

[odolvlobo]

No one owns Bitcoins. Bitcoins are represented n the blockchain which is distributed free of charge to anyone willing to download it.

Some may claim ownership of private keys, however.

That is a valid point.
Whatever you say that you have bitcoins or not both can be truth in the same time from a different point of view.
However best if you don't say to the police both on the same day because you will confuse them.

It is not a valid point. It is the same as saying that no one owns dollars. You possess a private key that signifies ownership of the bitcoins it represents.

[franky1]

lol worst advice ever is to say dont declare bitcoins. especially when the reasons of not declaring them is advice from a person that has not read the regulations, does not understand fincen and then goes on a power trip thinking they will cripple the world at some point.

major face palm.

i don't advise not declaring bitcoins. in as much as tins of baked beans. if the government ask how many you have.. just say what you have. so far governments are not asking. so there is nothing to worry or think about right now... but by lying for any reason if they ever do start asking can cost you alot more in the long run, instead of just telling the truth.

this is where exchanges go wrong, they dont read regulations, they don't follow the rules they lie when questioned.. and then everyone wonders why they get shut down

[Come-from-Beyond]

lol worst advice ever is to say dont declare bitcoins. especially when the reasons of not declaring them is advice from a person that has not read the regulations, does not understand fincen and then goes on a power trip thinking they will cripple the world at some point.

major face palm.

i don't advise not declaring bitcoins. in as much as tins of baked beans. if the government ask how many you have.. just say what you have. so far governments are not asking. so there is nothing to worry or think about right now... but by lying for any reason if they ever do start asking can cost you alot more in the long run, instead of just telling the truth.

this is where exchanges go wrong, they dont read regulations, they don't follow the rules they lie when questioned.. and then everyone wonders why they get shut down

I believe my advice is a good one. I may be wrong.

[Tornston]

The biggest problem governments will have with bitcoin is the anonymity involved in transactions. They will point to money laundering and criminals using it as an untraceable  medium of wealth as the reason to shut it down. Without that they won't have leg to stand on in a court of law. You'd think there aren't any real money laundering operations to warrant gov scrutiny.

People should pay taxes on bitcoins. It's probably the only thing that can prevent a complete shutdown.

I suppose it's not real
paying transactions on btc means all governmental transactions become transparent
they won't do this

[franky1]

you guys seriously need to atleast read the regulations and know how fincen/sec/fsa work.. they are not pro-active. they are reactive.

meaning if they get a complaint then they will act. if when acting they find something iffy, they will enforce.

so as long as you learn the rules and use them wisely to your advantage, so that if EG
a scammer tries to do a charge back, which triggers the banks to internally investigate and ask you questions. and you give them satisfactory information. they wont then make a SARS report to then cause fincen/FSA/SEC to come looking at you in detail.

fincen rules are for financial institutions to do internal investigations first. and only file a SARS report if the institutions own investigations dont end in complete satisfaction.

so the simple solution is to not lie, not hide details. comply with the rules and the snowball of headaches does not start rolling. it stops early on and you get to continue with business.

[aigeezer]

No one owns Bitcoins. Bitcoins are represented n the blockchain which is distributed free of charge to anyone willing to download it.

Some may claim ownership of private keys, however.

The implications of this kind of issue fascinate me.

For example, a private key is ultimately a string of digits - a number. People can now own such numbers, it seems, and it is potentially a crime for me to know "your" number or you to know "mine". The simple act of counting incrementally 1-2-3... can eventually make us all criminals - tax-dodging criminals at that. (Hehe - don't you dare say THAT number - it's mine, all mine - muhaaaa).

Furthermore, governments want to tax people because they have access to some of these numbers, through tax rules not yet determined (but I'll go out on a limb and predict they will be clumsy and invasive).

If you have other numbers in your possession - binary strings constituting data governments don't approve of when processed by some algorithm (such as a jpg image in a viewer) - then they might incarcerate you or worse. You might have in your possession a string, meaningless to you, that when processed by the State's algorithm indicated that you were guilty of horrible offenses - what you thought was your old tax return might turn out to generate a damning graphic image when seen through some arbitrary viewer after some arbitrary decompression process at some arbitrary resolution.

Complicated things, numbers. Hard to imagine any politicians or bureaucrats thinking these issues through very deeply.

What would they do if some day a number turned out to work as a private key representing, say, a trillion fiat-bucks worth of alt-coin, and happened also to play some national anthem when used as input to a music program and/or showed a lewd image when used as input to a viewer program and/or gave a recipe for making WMDs when used as input to a word processor? Would they tax you, salute you, disgrace you or send you to Gitmo? Improbable, of course, but not impossible and there is lots of potential for delicious paradox without resorting to this level of reductio.

[myrkul]

No one owns Bitcoins. Bitcoins are represented n the blockchain which is distributed free of charge to anyone willing to download it.

Some may claim ownership of private keys, however.

The implications of this kind of issue fascinate me.

For example, a private key is ultimately a string of digits - a number. People can now own such numbers, it seems, and it is potentially a crime for me to know "your" number or you to know "mine". The simple act of counting incrementally 1-2-3... can eventually make us all criminals - tax-dodging criminals at that. (Hehe - don't you dare say THAT number - it's mine, all mine - muhaaaa).

Yeah, that's why IP is stupid.

[Anon136]

No one owns Bitcoins. Bitcoins are represented n the blockchain which is distributed free of charge to anyone willing to download it.

Some may claim ownership of private keys, however.

The implications of this kind of issue fascinate me.

For example, a private key is ultimately a string of digits - a number. People can now own such numbers, it seems, and it is potentially a crime for me to know "your" number or you to know "mine". The simple act of counting incrementally 1-2-3... can eventually make us all criminals - tax-dodging criminals at that. (Hehe - don't you dare say THAT number - it's mine, all mine - muhaaaa).

Furthermore, governments want to tax people because they have access to some of these numbers, through tax rules not yet determined (but I'll go out on a limb and predict they will be clumsy and invasive).

If you have other numbers in your possession - binary strings constituting data governments don't approve of when processed by some algorithm (such as a jpg image in a viewer) - then they might incarcerate you or worse. You might have in your possession a string, meaningless to you, that when processed by the State's algorithm indicated that you were guilty of horrible offenses - what you thought was your old tax return might turn out to generate a damning graphic image when seen through some arbitrary viewer after some arbitrary decompression process at some arbitrary resolution.

Complicated things, numbers. Hard to imagine any politicians or bureaucrats thinking these issues through very deeply.

What would they do if some day a number turned out to work as a private key representing, say, a trillion fiat-bucks worth of alt-coin, and happened also to play some national anthem when used as input to a music program and/or showed a lewd image when used as input to a viewer program and/or gave a recipe for making WMDs when used as input to a word processor? Would they tax you, salute you, disgrace you or send you to Gitmo? Improbable, of course, but not impossible and there is lots of potential for delicious paradox without resorting to this level of reductio.

Sort of along the same lines, technically calculating pi is illegal. Since it contains all finite bitstrings doing so would break every single ip law in existence all at the same time. You would be a child pornographer and a media pirate and the owner of the plans to create a nuclear weapon. So anyone who attempts to calculate pi for research purposes puts themselves in danger of spending the rest of their life in prison.

[aigeezer]

Sort of along the same lines, technically calculating pi is illegal. Since it contains all finite bitstrings doing so would break every single ip law in existence all at the same time. You would be a child pornographer and a media pirate and the owner of the plans to create a nuclear weapon. So anyone who attempts to calculate pi for research purposes puts themselves in danger of spending the rest of their life in prison.

Yes... all things digital risk going into those kinds of issues. Our examples are extreme and therefore are perhaps easily dismissed, but the underlying issues are very real, I think. Laws and customs designed for dirtspace/meatspace do not work well in cyber/digital space - sort of like the tensions between Newtonian and quantum physics.

[Anon136]

Sort of along the same lines, technically calculating pi is illegal. Since it contains all finite bitstrings doing so would break every single ip law in existence all at the same time. You would be a child pornographer and a media pirate and the owner of the plans to create a nuclear weapon. So anyone who attempts to calculate pi for research purposes puts themselves in danger of spending the rest of their life in prison.

Yes... all things digital risk going into those kinds of issues. Our examples are extreme and therefore are perhaps easily dismissed, but the underlying issues are very real, I think. Laws and customs designed for dirtspace/meatspace do not work well in cyber/digital space - sort of like the tensions between Newtonian and quantum physics.

i just think its funny in how it illustrates the absurdity of the idea of owning an idea. which i own by the way so back off!

[Matthew N. Wright]

If someone has owned SolidCoins, can they declare that they have owned them to get a tax refund instead?

(or would that be considered supporting terrorism since SolidCoin infringes on copyrights?)

[aigeezer]

Sort of along the same lines, technically calculating pi is illegal. Since it contains all finite bitstrings doing so would break every single ip law in existence all at the same time. You would be a child pornographer and a media pirate and the owner of the plans to create a nuclear weapon. So anyone who attempts to calculate pi for research purposes puts themselves in danger of spending the rest of their life in prison.

Yes... all things digital risk going into those kinds of issues. Our examples are extreme and therefore are perhaps easily dismissed, but the underlying issues are very real, I think. Laws and customs designed for dirtspace/meatspace do not work well in cyber/digital space - sort of like the tensions between Newtonian and quantum physics.

i just think its funny in how it illustrates the absurdity of the idea of owning an idea. which i own by the way so back off!

Delicious: If I own your genes and you own the idea of gene ownership, then... a tree falls in the forest, or something.

Anyway, rigorously on topic, I now solemnly do not declare that I have ever owned BTC. 

[Come-from-Beyond]

you guys seriously need to atleast read the regulations and know how fincen/sec/fsa work.. they are not pro-active. they are reactive.

meaning if they get a complaint then they will act. if when acting they find something iffy, they will enforce.

so as long as you learn the rules and use them wisely to your advantage, so that if EG
a scammer tries to do a charge back, which triggers the banks to internally investigate and ask you questions. and you give them satisfactory information. they wont then make a SARS report to then cause fincen/FSA/SEC to come looking at you in detail.

fincen rules are for financial institutions to do internal investigations first. and only file a SARS report if the institutions own investigations dont end in complete satisfaction.

so the simple solution is to not lie, not hide details. comply with the rules and the snowball of headaches does not start rolling. it stops early on and you get to continue with business.

Hey, here is ur other quote:

banks are not pulling the rugs from under exchanges.

exchanges dont even bother making rugs.. they just stand on the cold floor.

meaning they dont bother reading the regulations, getting authorised, keeping records or following any of the rules of handling fiat.

its like a majority of these exchanges are run by amateurs that have no previous experience in finance.

the community needs to up its game. its not difficult.

but being lazy by ignoring the laws and then blaming the regulators like its a total surprise is just reasons why i see the half assed attempts of making exchanges always fail.

Wild guess, u work for government. Am I right, Mr. Smith?

[Hawker]

There are a lot of threads about taxation and FinCEN regulation on this forum. Now you can pay taxes, register yourself as Money Service Business (MSB) and sleep well, but... The state won't stop and will continue to strangle Bitcoin. One day it will make Bitcoin illegal.

Now the state collects data who uses Bitcoin, so in the future (when Bitcoin becomes illegal) they'll pay very close attention to those who declared that they "touched" bitcoins. It's a well known trick:
1. Pretend you are just going to regulate something.
2. Collect data about users.
3. Make it illegal.
4. Spy the users.
5. Prosecute those who violate the law.

Keep this in mind...

I've put a provision in my will for my Bitcoin.  But then I see no way at all that possession of Bitcoin could ever be made illegal.  

[Kaiji]

The biggest problem governments will have with bitcoin is the anonymity involved in transactions. They will point to money laundering and criminals using it as an untraceable  medium of wealth as the reason to shut it down. Without that they won't have leg to stand on in a court of law. You'd think there aren't any real money laundering operations to warrant gov scrutiny.

People should pay taxes on bitcoins. It's probably the only thing that can prevent a complete shutdown.

Wasn't there a ruling by FinCen not too long ago stating something to the effect of declaring what is converted back to fiat for capital gains purposes, meaning it's semi-legit in the US?

I've read that too, they can only tax you if you convert bitcoins to fiat currency.

[AlgoSwan]

There is a very simple solution to all of these: Remove all fiat money from BTC exchanges.

[Come-from-Beyond]

There is a very simple solution to all of these: Remove all fiat money from BTC exchanges.

What do u expect to exchange bitcoins for in this case?

[myrkul]

There is a very simple solution to all of these: Remove all fiat money from BTC exchanges.

What do u expect to exchange bitcoins for in this case?

Precious metals?

If you thought bank transfers took forever....

[nebulus]

Bitcoin anonymity is a myth. Take satoshi for example, the guy has millions but can't be spending to "save his life"...