You're not the first. Plenty of people pay their taxes both on income and capital gains. I've paid capital gains taxes on my bitcoin earnings for the past few years and it went fine. Absolutely no problems at all. I will now likely not have any issue if I want to go buy something like a house whereas if I hadn't have been declaring my gains I would have had a bank account with a load of money that I wouldn't have been able to buy a house with because it wouldn't have been accounted for income. I would then likely be investigated and hit with fines for any taxes I had missed on paying. I would suggest people just actually read up on the rules for income and capital gains taxes in their country instead of just making up their own rules to suit themselves or their greed because it's only a matter of time before a lot of them start looking into crypto earnings and gains and if you're a long-term hodler there's going to be a time where you start wanting to buy houses and lambos and good luck with that heat you attract.
Im talking about signature campaign gains specifically.
How does one prove that the money comes from a legal activity (in this case, signature campaign bounties) and how is this declared?
Do they ask for screenshots of the threads where it shows the rates? what if the rates change and they do over time? how do you prove you own these accounts in which you got paid at? signed message with the account you got paid at?
And so on. That's what im talking about, and there are no clear rules about that. Anyone that wants to eventually sell, needs to know that information to be ready.
Let's say you have never made more than $10,000 a year from signature campaign payments, so in the case that one wanted to sell it, it would just be regular capital gains I guess. But one must look how it works in your country.
My point is, im never going to avoid taxes, when I cash out, basically because it's impossible if you want to buy real estate with that money, and I want to know what to expect, so I have all the info ready when I want to sell an amount and buy a house, because if you don't have all the info ready, they can just froze your account and end up confiscating your money (it has happened before), in which case you would have been better off keeping it on BTC where it remains safe no matter what (assuming the BTC wasn't obtained in NSA central like Coinbase)
That's willfully evading taxes and makes your punishment much worse when caught and if they find out you've purposely avoided and evaded taxes then that's when jail time becomes a possibility. It's up to you whether you want to take the risk but the longer you leave it the bigger the penalties will be. They usually want interest on the money you owed for every year on top of fines so you have to decide whether that risk is worth if for you. Again, if you didn't earn much in the first place then you might not have been due to pay anything so just pay the capital gains when you cash out and there shouldn't be any worries. The fact that you have paid your gains willfully will count a lot for you. Not paying them willfully could come back to haunt you if they do every catch up with you, though.
Nope, that's just being realistic. In some countries, they have laws that go something like this:
"if you are holding in value higher than $500,000 and you haven't declared it, it means automatically jailtime".
So let's say you mined some coins in 2011 or something, mined a couple 50 BTC blocks, and you had a 100 BTC wallet that you forgot about for years.
Once you find out about Bitcoin again, your money is worth millions.
The scenario is similar with signature campaigns, you got paid from 2011 to 2013, forget about BTC because you think it's dead, then you get interested again and they are worth a ton.
So basically, if you tell the government, you'll go to jail, because you are holding an amount higher than whatever treshhold they have for jail time for unreported gains.
This is why you must really know how it works in your jurisdiction. Some laws are just stupid, and you are better off keeping your money in BTC, rather than end up poor and in jail. You couldn't be able to spend your BTC in flashy things which sucks, no nice house and car for you, but it sure beats ending up with bigger problems just because you are trying to do the right thing. That's why again, you must be sure how these things work before doing anything stupid. The only thing guaranteed is that your BTC are safe were they are at (assuming your cold storage is good), so be sure you know what to expect if you try to go fiat.