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May 14, 2014, 12:12:33 PM |
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More food for thought, if it is legally classified as a foreign currency, all of the currency reporting laws would apply in addition to the higher tax rates. This would potentially allow the government to prosecute all sorts of people for failure to report and the penalties for failing to report are horrendous. As long a your bitcoin are in a wallet on your PC, you might be fine, but the moment you send too many to an exchange that isn't US based at one time or in the course of one day, you would have to do massive amounts of paperwork to not be breaking the law. Having a wallet stored in the cloud would be a grey area that could put a target on your back.
Take bitcoin out of the equation, if you have $10,001 in a Swiss bank, you have to do all sorts of paperwork because it's currency. On the other hand, if you own a house in a foreign country (presumably a much greater value than $10,001), you own a house in a foreign country, it's just an asset, much less paperwork that doesn't have to be filed every year.
Now, here's even more to think about... Who is contributing to Mr. Stockman? Everyone threw a fit when Manchin wanted to ban bitcoin and immediately noticed that he gets a lot of money from a big bank. I'm betting Mr. Stockman does as well. I'm not saying he doesn't have good intentions, but with MasterCard hiring a number of lobbyists, it wouldn't be surprising at all for financial institutions to be attacking at other levels. My personal opinion is that a bill like this (it uses the word moratorium, which sounds great, but in reality, it prevents capital gains tax from being collected on something that it aims to reclassify so that it is no longer a capital asset; it doesn't prevent income tax from being collected on that same something that is now classified as currency whose value fluctuations are now classified as income instead of capital gains) is only beneficial to those who want to destroy bitcoin. I'm not even checking to see who his contributors/donators are, and I'm not screaming conspiracy, because this could just as easily be pure cluelessness or even simply political posturing.
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