should government involvement be there ?

[bitgolden]

No, I don’t really think so. The government is not involved in this, neither are they getting involved in it; even if they will, it won’t be anytime soon.

Though they might get involved in mining Bitcoin, but not to charge taxes. I’m starting to suspect the government hand is into the price increase lately. Maybe they’re investing into Bitcoin secretly. You don’t always know what they’re up to.

[1714594570]

1714594570

[spadormie]

I really do not think that government involvement is necessary in this. But we really can't deny that bitcoin is for all bitcoin is a thing that is for all and you just need to become a bitcoin literate for you to have access to it. But if the government gets involved here in cryptocurrency, probably bitcoin's word would be spread all over the world.

[LindaQ]

I need to hear from someone who have seen the bitcoin as a familiar transaction tool in their country. Are the government tell the merchant to pay a tax or something because using bitcoin?

[stompix]

Australia and Japan have already considered making bitcoin a legal currency and now even India is thinking about imposing taxes on bitcoins and legalizing it considering that so many people escape paying taxes by holding bitcoins. The taxes are going to be huge as unlike shares, bitcoin price fluctuations are high and in my country, the taxes on fiat itself are so high, I can't imagine how much will they charge for bitcoins.

Tracking bitcoins is an easy process where they can just ban domains like blockchain and make everyone use coinbase/xapo kinda wallets only if they want their money to be considered white. That way, even fiat can be used in money laundering and tax thieves will find some way or the other to use black money.

Why would the bitcoin taxes be so high?It makes no sense.

You will get the same taxation as you do when you buy a house or you buy a hotdog with fiat.
Let's say that you pay your taxes in fiat at the start of the year. You pay 4k$.

You pay your taxes in btc , you pay 1BTC. It really doesn't matter how high the BTC price  will soar afterwards.You paid 4k$ worth of.
You could just as easily with the fiat that you left untouched buy a BTC back from an exchange.

You think like a guy who is not going to eat anything for 5 years and spend all his foodmoney on BTC cause it's going to be a millionaire.

Now, to the bad part.

Tracking bitcoins is an easy process where they can just ban domains like blockchain

Huh, what

coinbase/xapo kinda wallets only if they want their money to be considered white

Again, what

It was (a very long time ago) a project about colored coins. Dead on arrival.
It won't work. And if somehow everybody would be forced to use a government issued wallet service bitcoin price would drop to 0 in seconds.

[nexus99]

The very idea of Bitcoin would cease to exist if governments were to be involved in this. The price would definitely come crashing down as people would just lose interest in operating with btc. After all, it is so much about anonymity

[balakang00]

   It would be possible for the government to be involved in bitcoin. It is when they have tax implementation on each bitcoin users. It can be on each transaction of the bitcoin users which will then be passed on the consumers that will result on an add on feature to this kind of cryptocurrency. If it became legal on any country it surely would have tax implementation which is surely a big amount of money for the government. Although that is kinda negative, on the positive side it is helpful for the government to gain funds for the betterment of the society in general.

[deisik]

The government can impose tax based on the transaction and I know that the government can be creative enough to find ways and means to this effect. For example, they can be charging wallet providers for all of their transactions and these fees will eventually be passed to the consumers...sometimes without is noticing of it because it is already an add-on feature.

The government has the power to tax, that we must remember at all times. In many countries, not declaring and paying correct amount of tax has big penalties attached into it so people are always making sure that they are not violating the law otherwise it can be a big hell to thresh out with once you are entangled with the government authorities. 

Do they really have this power?

Apart from that, they likely don't need it altogether since they can just raid the exchanges which they don't quite like (read the ones which don't pay for licenses or anything to that tune). Anyway, how are they going to tax transactions according to you? Make web wallets collect some extra fees? People would just stop using these wallets in less than no time, and you can be dead sure the throne won't be empty for long. What other viable ways are available to them? I don't think there is any which wouldn't mean destroying Bitcoin at the same time

You make some valid points. I think if there is any way to tax it would be through the exchanges. But, I also think it is possible to withdraw a portion of each transaction in a mined block, through the blockchain network. In fact, I think that would be the easier way. It would be like an additional network fee. Don't you think?

This has been discussed before

Introducing such a tax would be equal to taxing mining operations directly. But here's the problem, no country would want to do that since doing that would undermine the competitiveness of their local miners. In fact, it seems like things tend to develop in the opposite direction, and, say, the Chinese miners are rumored to be subsidized by the government on electricity costs. In this way, introducing such taxes locally would be counterproductive since you would not only fail to receive this kind of tax (in any significant amount) but rather damage the mining industry in your country (unless this is your intention, of course)

[RedditMaster]

Government involvement is inevitable. It serves no purpose to discuss if it should or not, because it always will be.

[Alcinoos]

Basically Bitcoin is like cash, one can totally hide a transaction and hence pay no tax on it. Governments spend way too much money, so when facing a taxes dropdown, they will have to lower then spendings.

[Ucy]

Governments do tax Bitcoin, maybe indirectly unless you mean something more aggressive. Bitcoin can successfully evade this things. It is not  Centralized, there is no way Government will win... no longer business as usual.  Governments will try to get what they want but   will only end up helping people create alternatives that will be harder or iimpossible to control.

[xuan87]

Sooner or later the government will try to regulate Bitcoin, it is true that when we do transaction with Bitcoin we don't pay any taxes to the government and some of the transaction is a big number, if a lot of people using Bitcoin for transactions the country will lack of income tax, when the country reach that point the government will take action by regulate Bitcoin or banned Bitcoin, for now the users still not too many so the government hasn't really pay high attention to bitcoin

[subSTRATA]

Governments do tax Bitcoin, maybe indirectly unless you mean something more aggressive. Bitcoin can successfully evade this things. It is not  Centralized, there is no way Government will win... no longer business as usual.  Governments will try to get what they want but   will only end up helping people create alternatives that will be harder or iimpossible to control.

bitcoin, maybe not, but a cryptocurrency created and backed by a government, i could definitely see it happening. however, this is only the case if cryptocurrency turns out to be the 'currency of the future,' and bitcoin lost out somewhere along the way. not totally impossible though. the new government crypto could be designed such that every transation has a separate fee that's sent to a tax address, sort of like how multibit HD implemented its small fee a few years back.

The very idea of Bitcoin would cease to exist if governments were to be involved in this. The price would definitely come crashing down as people would just lose interest in operating with btc. After all, it is so much about anonymity

i dont think its as much about anonymity as much as it is about decentralization. addresses and wallets are fairly trackable to some extent, and all transactions are viewable to the public.

[spain cool]

We follow the next developments. I hope there is no law governing all this, if it is not needed. Because maybe it will make it difficult for us to transact.

[mrcash02]

Governments can create a Crypto-Currency for them and forbid all the rest for their population. Instead of printing money they would generate Crypto-Currency by statal mining. They would find a way to control the prices as they do now with their currencies. That is the only way to control the coins, they can't control an existing one, especially Bitcoin, because it's a global currency, what happens on the another countries affect the price.

[Shamie1002]

Well if you wanted a future for bitcoin like in markets, hospitals, schools and etc. Yes, bitcoins should be accepted by government first because the legality is run by them. Government affects the acceptance of bitcoin in a country. Some markets are afraid to invest in bitcoin because once that their country banned bitcoin, they are just like a ship that sank in the middle of the ocean.
I just hope that the government will be fair in putting tax into bitcoins.

[cpfreeplz]

You don't send off your sales tax to the government because no one would pay it! Clearly you just get charged at the store then they send off the money to the government. What a confusing post. There is no government insolvent in the sense that they can't change anything. If one government was trying to change bitcoins many more governments/people would step in and make sure they couldn't take over even if they wanted to!

[Vannie12]

If the Government will contribute for faster acceptance of bitcoin within the Country, I think it would be great. But since I have heard that they are putting taxes in transactions, I am think twice about it.

[Ctn]

Price of bitcoin is increasing tremendously, but that has got to do nothing with government. Just because something is getting very valuable doesn't mean government will try to levy charge on that. Bitcoin is decentralised mechanism based on mathematical calculation which produced block chain. The value it is getting is because people are putting their own money (which is taxed already by banks) and because of that money its capitalism is increasing.


Though they try to standardise the bitcoin it won't be that easy. Just imagine millions of wallets and millions of bitcoin addresses are generated each second. In how many you will keep track and how?

[HasHe]

The governments could start regulating bitcoin by regulating bitcoin exchanges as PBOC did in china to regulate the top three bitcoin exchanges there and almost controlled bitcoin dealings in china.It framed new rules like asking bitcoin holders to give KYC details to exchanges and providing details that from where they actually got those bitcoins.This same metod would be followed by other respective governments also to have control over bitcoin transactions.But,if a person sends bitcoins from his individual wallet to another person's wallet,then it could not be traced unless it is sold for cash and money withdrawn from banks.

[deisik]

Governments can create a Crypto-Currency for them and forbid all the rest for their population. Instead of printing money they would generate Crypto-Currency by statal mining. They would find a way to control the prices as they do now with their currencies. That is the only way to control the coins, they can't control an existing one, especially Bitcoin, because it's a global currency, what happens on the another countries affect the price.

And why do you think it would work?

Governments have already created fiat, and what prevents them from doing the same right now? That is, forbid all other currencies (crypto or otherwise) for the population? Anything that you can say about government cryptocoin would be equally applicable to the currency that they already have, i.e. fiat money. If they don't ban crypto, it means that they either can't do it ("don't forbid what you lack the power to prevent") or they don't think it dangerous to the fiat money monopoly they possess