Smearing Bitcoin owners. Tax cheats.

Over the past year, a repeating trend within the news articles that I see, is that the IRS claims that only a very small fraction of Bitcoin owners have been reporting their earnings. The claim is due to repeat itself this year as far as I can tell.

I just saw an article reporting that out of 250,000 people who did their taxes through credit karma, only a small handful of people reported Bitcoin earnings. From this, an illrepresened figure of 20 people, overall, are said to have claimed Bitcoin on their taxes this year so far, to the IRS. 20. 20!? Out of the entire USA population?! This number is obviously bs. When claiming Bitcoin earnings as a piece of property, there are multiple ways to report it, in the form of naming the piece of property (BTC, Bitcoin, crypto, digital currency, etc...), And I suspect that the figures they've given us VASTLY underreport how many people pay their taxes. It's easy to narrow your field of view on searching for the asset to just one keyword, and not see the rest. To give you an idea of what I'm talking about, if I had sold my classic corvette for profit, this same spot on the tax form is where I'd report that. If I had sold some jewelry for profit, same spot. This form is used for all types of property. Until there's a separate form for crypto currency, their numbers will always be wrong.

This is just another way to try and defeat Bitcoin. Nobody likes a tax cheat. Convince the country that BTC holders don't pay their taxes, and before you know it, you have large numbers of people against them.

I personally pay my taxes on BTC. It's not an anonymous currency, and one day, (irs can look back 7 years) you may get caught. If regulation forces exchanges to hand over all of their customer data, everyone who didn't pay will be in for a wild ride.

The point of this post isn't to convince you to pay your taxes, it's just to point out that the media wants to paint us as mostly tax cheats. I just don't think that's true at all.

I wish they would give us the same type of figures on people who sell their antique gold jewelry, or gold bullion that they've held onto for years for a handsome profit. Or maybe those gambling winnings that don't hit the reporting threshold at casinos in Vegas.

Or how about the hundreds of thousands of garage sales that happen every weekend where millions of dollars change hands.

In summary, alot of people are paying their taxes. We are to believe that is not the case, but don't fuel the fire. Don't spread this form of FUD.

Submitted April 16, 2018 at 04:37PM by werwer12 https://ift.tt/2IZSujI