I'd love for the IRS to try and come audit me over this. I bet it would take an accountant working full time for at least a month to sort through all the altcoin penny trades, mining across multiple pools with 3 different computers, shifting BTC and altcoins across a half dozen exchanges (we get to deduct transfer and exchange fees, right?) I imagine it would make even an accountant's head explode.
And when all was said and done, I might owe like $100 in taxes, plus whatever penalty applies. It will be worth it just for the chuckles.
Go ahead, IRS. This is trench warfare, and I'm gonna bleed you to death if that's the game you want to play.
Valid point.
The cost to them to find that $100 would be ridiculous, so if they did it sooner or later it just needs to be made public how much they wasted on such nonsense and it would stop. They likely already know they can't do that kind of thing. I think it's big fish they want to net.
I'm wondering this. What about these guys who lose bitcoins? Either their PC gets lost, they forgot the details for their wallet, or like a guy over here who threw his old HDD away with 3 million on bitcoin in a wallet on it and only remembered when they hit 1k. They could prove you had them via the exchange, but you wouldn't actually have them. What then?
They'd probably assume that you cashed them in somehow, made a large gain.