Forget selfies and passports – crypto should be private

[legiteum]

In the US, your gains from Bitcoin (or whatever) are taxed, which is also true in many countries. Yes, you can fail to claim your gains on your tax return and not pay those taxes, but you can do that with any kind of investment.

I don't think so. I'm not in the US, but it is far more difficult for a tax authority to monitor every transaction across all banking systems and question each one to determine whether you realized your Bitcoin gains than it is with other investments, where regulated intermediaries often report directly to tax authorities.

In my place, gold coins are bought and sold, and I am very sure a large portion of those transactions and gains are not ever reported. I can imagine the same with peer-to-peer exchanges in bitcoin.

Tax evasion in the US has been happening since taxation began. Bitcoin did not invent tax evasion, and it doesn't even really make it much easier since you would need to engage in tradecraft to create fully hidden transactions if you wanted to be reasonably sure the IRS couldn't track it down.

99.9% of consumers actually want their tax compliance to be handled automatically so they stay out of trouble.

If tax evaders is the audience for Bitcoin, it's an extremely small one, and one that will support a market cap of no more than a few $million, not billions and certainly not trillions.

Oh, and once again, this is an even worse advertisement for Bitcoin since it has a public ledger so if you are going to use it break the law, it's simply not as good at that compared to Monero and things like it. Hence the argument, "buy Bitcoin so you can evade taxes" doesn't even hold water on its own terms.

[BlackHatCoiner]

99.9% of consumers actually want their tax compliance to be handled automatically so they stay out of trouble.

A lot of people are like that, indeed. But a large subset of the population does evade taxes and hold gold under the mattress. If you think all gold holders of the entire world are completely okay with reporting their purchases and sales of gold to their government, you're just delusional.

If tax evaders is the audience for Bitcoin, it's an extremely small one, and one that will support a market cap of no more than a few $million, not billions and certainly not trillions.

Libertarian tax evaders are one of the many audiences of Bitcoin. Institutional money are another audience, which is what makes the former group find bitcoin a lucrative opportunity instead of gold.

[legiteum]

99.9% of consumers actually want their tax compliance to be handled automatically so they stay out of trouble.

A lot of people are like that, indeed. But a large subset of the population does evade taxes and hold gold under the mattress. If you think all gold holders of the entire world are completely okay with reporting their purchases and sales of gold to their government, you're just delusional.

I didn't say, "all", I said almost everybody. The market for tax evasion has been around forever, but it's microscopic compared to the market for mainstream investment done above board.

If tax evaders is the audience for Bitcoin, it's an extremely small one, and one that will support a market cap of no more than a few $million, not billions and certainly not trillions.

Libertarian tax evaders are one of the many audiences of Bitcoin. Institutional money are another audience, which is what makes the former group find bitcoin a lucrative opportunity instead of gold.

And they are by far the least significant, from the standpoint of Bitcoin's market cap.

(And I called myself "libertarian" for years and I never considered becoming a criminal nor did anybody else I know. Instead we tried to get the government to lower our taxes legally. Libertarians aren't criminals, and criminals only call themselves "libertarians" to wrap their criminality in some kind of fancy-sounding ideological wrapper. If somebody is just creating a scheme for themselves to pay less of society's overhead burden and not trying to lower it for everybody else, they aren't "libertarian criminals", they are just plain old criminals).