This varies by country, but in the United States, the law does treat bitcoin like any other commodity, mostly. There are a few exceptions.
One difference is that gold trading is specifically regulated under the Bank Secrecy Act, whereas other commodities are not.
Another difference is that for federal income tax, capital gains on certain tangible property (coins, collectables) are taxed at a higher rate than intangible property.
Many state sales tax laws also make a distinction between tangible and intangible property.
Topic: does AML apply to commodities? (Read 883 times)
I would argue that we need to distinguish between cryptocurrencies (inflationary, no max cap of coins thought for use in daily transactions like doge or frc)
and cryptocommodities (hard max cap with exponential diminishing blockrewards and thus deflationary and not of great use as a currency to drive economics or do a great deal of transactions like btc or uno - which are more a store of value like gold or real estate)
i would call for this distinguishment between cryptocommodities and cryptocurrencies since this way all the currency-laws wouldn't apply to deflationary crypto and would save us a lot of paperwork at least for the commodities since other laws would apply (see german approach to bitcoin). Was this brought up before? I know in most countries i can purchase small and medium amounts of precious metals anonymously (up to around 5,000-10,000$ per day in most cases). Those rules seem to have worked for a long time for those markets since they are still applied after decades. Why would that not work for btc? I think it could. In my opinion the law should treat btc like it treats gold and silver. Makes the most sense.
and cryptocommodities (hard max cap with exponential diminishing blockrewards and thus deflationary and not of great use as a currency to drive economics or do a great deal of transactions like btc or uno - which are more a store of value like gold or real estate)
i would call for this distinguishment between cryptocommodities and cryptocurrencies since this way all the currency-laws wouldn't apply to deflationary crypto and would save us a lot of paperwork at least for the commodities since other laws would apply (see german approach to bitcoin). Was this brought up before? I know in most countries i can purchase small and medium amounts of precious metals anonymously (up to around 5,000-10,000$ per day in most cases). Those rules seem to have worked for a long time for those markets since they are still applied after decades. Why would that not work for btc? I think it could. In my opinion the law should treat btc like it treats gold and silver. Makes the most sense.
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