What is everyones perception on the tax code?
It's pretty brutal.
The new GOP tax overhaul makes it worse in some ways, too. You will no longer be able to deduct custodial losses, meaning it will be increasingly important to hedge against exchange risk. For example: If you make a bunch of trades that trigger short term capital gains liabilities, and then you lose all your money to an exchange hack, the IRS will still expect you to pay taxes on the capital gains.
Do you think the future president after Trump will re-categorize crypto as stock? Long term capital gains are manageable.
The IRS already declared that digital currency is treated as "property" under the tax code. That means that capital gains rates (both short-term and long-term) apply. There isn't much difference in the treatment of Bitcoin vs. stocks. There
are some differences when you start to look at taxation of coins that emerge from a hard fork split, airdrops, income derived from staking, etc. Buying/selling bitcoin is much simpler, though.