But I do agree that most businesses will prefer (for a while) to pay taxes anyway, "just in case".
Most current business will accept to pay taxes for their BTC gains.
But expecting the future will be the same as now if crypto get mainstream is naive.
The incentives to go dark with crypto is insanely high.
Crypto can help gov to collect taxes only if one wants to pay taxes by publishing his public key. If one does not want to publish the public key, gov is toasted.
Businesses (legal or not) are becoming more and more knowledge based, so here are three incentives to go dark :
- Impossibility to quantify knowledge work output
- Impossibility to seize or trace crypto
- Raising taxes
I am confident that knowledge output will always be impossible to quantify.
I am confident that seizing or tracing crypto will never be possible. (it is a math problem, not a law problem)
So the only lever the government will have to decrease "dark business" is decreasing taxes.
But less taxes clearly mean its power will shrink as a consequence.
Existing business will continue to pay taxes. But I highly doubt the new one in a crypto age will do the same. (especially knowledge work)