I'm not concerned and neither should you be. The points I make on this board are pretty much general "what ifs" when things get bigger. I suppose pooled mining won't last that long. However, if our IRS saw that the equivalent of 20+ million dollars comes into creation, you can be sure they want a piece. In Las Vegas, if you win a large amount, they tax you right there. I don't know if they'd let you go home with the chips on the promise to pay the tax when you come back and sell them to the cash cage. They equate the win with money, just like the win of a car. I don't know whether they'd tax the Bitcoins as cash, but they would impute a certain value to the Bitcoins and tax someone on that. Now, here in the US, the IRS would realize that it was not completely feasable to tax the person who got the Bitcoins due to anonymity reasons, so I think they would tax mining pools here, theorizing that the mining pool actually took possession of the asset before passing it along, and have the mining pool do "withholding" just like an employer does with wages, or Vegas does with chip winnings. Hopefully this flies under their radar, or we base the mining pool in Switzerland or the Grand Cayman Island.
I'd like to take this time to point out that no casino in Las Vegas taxes you on your winnings. They prefer you to be responsible.
What they do is give you a W2-G that shows your winnings, but withhold 0 taxes. This, then, forces you as the winner to be responsible to the IRS to pay taxes on it out of your own money. This makes sense from the casino end (Where they would have to track millions of W2-Gs, and hold onto millions of dollars in tax money, tracking everything), but not the player end (The Winner assumes that everything is taken care of, when it isn't).
It would, further, be impossible for the casino to calculate the tax rate they should be required to withhold. What if you win $500,000 more from other casinos? Technically you should have had more withheld from each individual win.
I say this from working (and of course, playing and winning) in casinos for the last 10 years, on top of designing the software required to run some of these casinos.
Of course, this is probably all OT, and should likely go somewhere in the Economics boards.
