Topic: USA Bitcoin mining, development, running nodes, transfer >$10K now felonies - page 2. (Read 352 times)

Looks like United States are slowly turning into tax hell not only related with Bitcoin but with everything else, and I think they are planning to increase other taxes soon.
I don't know if they are really thinking they can avoid financial collapse with this mambo jumbo stuff or they just want to milk as much money from people as they can.
I also wonder what would happen if majority of people just stop paying bunch of taxes (call it peoples experiment), at least not pay them like they are paying them now, that is more like an extortion.

Oh sure. I was just pointing out that this was the relevant piece of the law as applies to what OP was talking about.

What annoys me about this is not that they are bringing bitcoin in to line with cash trades, it is that they continue to treat bitcoin as whatever suits them best at the time. By all means treat bitcoin as the same as cash - I think that is an entire reasonable stance to take - but then you need to acknowledge that it is indeed a currency and stop charging people capital gains on it when they buy a cup of coffee. At the moment it is treated as cash for the situations where it means the government can tax you more, and it is treated as property for situations where it means the government can tax you more.

But the point is that if I were selling you unregistered real goods for cash. Say, gold coins. That same law applies.'

If I sell you a car, there is a record of sale, transfer of the VIN and some other stuff in which you could not really have to do it.

If I sell you a bag of diamonds there is not. If I sell you a few of top of the line gaming video cards at the moment there is not. If either one of these things happen, you are responsible for the same thing.

Just because nobody does it, does not mean that it should not be done by law.

I used to see this all the time when a sort of co-workers family had side business dealing in wholesale used pinball / video games. People would try to hand them cash, and they would ask for check / CC instead just to avoid dealing with the reporting. They finally put up a sign in the office that said. "The games take cash, we only take credit cards" And that was 20+ years ago. It's not even that people were avoiding taxes, it's just that arcades had a lot of cash and it's was easier for them to let someone else deal with the paperwork.

-Dave

The text of the bill can be viewed here: https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/3684/text

The first point to note is this one. A broker shall include:
It is trivial to argue that a miner is responsible for providing a service which effectuates transfers on behalf of someone else, given that without miners there would be no transactions at all. I know franky1 likes to endlessly repeat his opinion with no evidence to suggest that anyone in the US Congress thinks the same way he does, but the fact of the matter is that there have been multiple attempts in both the House and the Senate at redefining this language and there are already some members of Congress promising to bring forth new legislation to redefine this language. If this language was as clear and unambiguous as franky1 thinks it is, then there would not have been several previous and several ongoing attempts to fix it. It doesn't matter at all at how any single one of us interprets this language; it can be interpreted in a way which suggests that miners are brokers, and this interpretation has been reached by multiple members of both chambers. If you think for a second that the US government will not interpret it in the way that suits them best and lets them tax as many people as much as possible, then you are incredibly naive.

The second point to note is this one.

Section 6050i (https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/26/6050I) says this:

Anyone who makes a trade (or a series of related trades) worth more than $10,000, must file a return containing the name, address, and TIN (Taxpayer Identification Number) of the person they are trading with. The TIN is most commonly the other party's SSN. At current prices, this means you can trade a total of 0.16 BTC with someone before you have to ask for their KYC information and SSN.

But that does not make for good scare headlines.
What is also interesting is that cash and similar instruments have had reporting requirements for a very long time.
Someone hands your business $10000 for something you do have reporting obligations. This is just putting BTC / crypto in the same pile as cash.

-Dave

NO THEY WONT

the myth started from some idiot on twitter that has no clue what bitcoin is to realise the difference between a node and a broker

he has no fiat understanding of the term broker either
the idiot started a FUD and many people fell for it and became fearful.

exchanges are brokers.. not developers
mixers are brokers not miners
remitters are brokers not node users

so calm yourself down. and realise the actually terminology is about persons offering a service for payment, where the service is the custodialship of coin for and on behalf of others payments

so calm down developers, node users and miners are not affected.

It is really a real pity that reason did not prevail and that some amendments were not accepted, which in my opinion is very strange considering that the crypto community in the US is very strong and active. It seems that large crypto companies were not very interested in trying to prevent or at least to some extent change this law, and in that case, it does not seem to be a problem for them.

It remains to be seen how this law will be implemented in practice and how much impact it will have on Bitcoin globally.

Mods, I urge you to add this to important announcements. This is a PSA for the USA.

The US "infrastructure" bill passed the Senate and House. It will be signed by the President in the next few days.

When this is done, all US citizens engaging in mining, development, running a node (i.e. running Bitcoin core) will be legally "brokers". These activities will now be felonies, by federal law, since reporting is impossible.

Additionally, transferring >$10k without recipient's SS#, etc. will be a felony.

Staking for proof-of-stake (PoS) cryptos, NFTs and sending money via DeFi are also now felonies. DeFi is dead.

Privacy is also effectively banned.

If you live in the US, please make considerations for all your crypto activities, before this bill becomes law.