My CPA assures me that capital gains do not 'back-feed' and become earned income.
This is tricky.
From what I've read, capital gains are stacked on top of your normal income, so they will not push your regular income into a higher bracket.
But... let's say your regular income is $4000 short of the amount needed to put you in a 25% tax bracket (thus 15% tax on capital gains). If you have $10,000 in capital gains, $4000 of that will be taxed at 0% and the $6000 that puts you into the next bracket will be taxed at 15%. Your regular income is still taxed at 15%. Is that what your CPA told you?
Typical disclaimer that this is not tax advice and one should seek professional tax advice, blah blah blah.
This does NOT seem to be the message I was getting in my case.
It is critically important the my Bitcoin speculation is not associated with any form of business but is rather just a private individual adventure but I forgot the exact technical term used. If the profits are associated with a business things get very ugly very quickly.
As always, standard disclaimer, get professional tax help and some idiot on a forum does not qualify.
As a follow-up:
My CPA's current read is that the long term capital gains DO 'back-feed' into ones income and push them into a higher bracket where the 0% rate does not apply. She says that the verbiage has been changed slightly this year or last, and it is still a bit nebulous.
Also, I neglected to think much about my state tax. It's 9% across the board and they don't pay any attention to the long term capital gains nonsense.
So, I'm looking at either 24% or 34% of my sales going to taxes. It's still less by percentage than your average working stiff and less than I paid when I was one. This is especially the case when one blows all their income on trinkets which are significantly taxed in most states, so I'm not really complaining all that much.
Had I not been pretty conservative in my financial planning when I took some BTC profits I very well could be looking at a situation where I had to sell at today's (hopefully) shitty prices. Even so, my CPA didn't do me any favors by changing her interpretation. The initial assurtion was a strong factor in my selling regime, and I would have massaged what in retrospect was recent peak prices more rather than waiting until 2014 to start.
Now that more people have doubtlessly been talking to their CPA's, I'd be most interested in whether other's have a different interpretation about whether capital gains impact one's tax bracket.
,but sadly I am a bit late to the party. Still, trying my best to earn and invest some. Its inspiring to see other people's stories posted here. You'v been quite lucky guys. 
