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Why the hell did someone downzap your comment??
It is very informative and detail I was not aware of- thank you.
Have always suspected that the designation of BTC as a commodity rather than a currency was at the core of this but never knew the detail.
The fiat bankers cartel have effectively owned our governments- we need to be both aware of this and work toward changing it.
Why the hell did someone downzap your comment??
Based on the play style, that’s gotta be a bot!
I struggle to distinguish between bots comments and real peoples comments as I have never used any AI or bot tech knowingly at least.
How can you definitively know what is from a bot or real person?
Regardless the comment is relevant and informative and adds to the dialogue imo.
If it is false information then maybe not but if it is not visible then nobody can refute or contest it if it is misinformation.
English ain't my first language, so I'm not that great at analyzing how people talk. I'm mostly looking at behavior patterns. I spend a lot of time checking new comments and you can definitely spot some patterns there. Another giveaway is that bots NEVER zap posts before commenting. Some of them try to fake it by zapping a single sat, but they probably don't realize we can see exactly how much they're sending! ahahah
Thanks that makes sense although I suspect there are also real people here who post content primarily seeking sats and seldom if ever send sats.
In fact @zeke if a bot does regardless appear to have both send and receive wallets attached so if they do zap they are using real money not CCs, and their content at least in this case appears to be informative.
Maybe not all bots are bad ? ! ~ if they are contributing decent content?
Yeah, I could drop a few right now, but it just doesn't feel right.
The only problem with these bots is that they’re out here tryna scam people (grinding for sats). They gotta be labeled as bots, SN's got an API for that.
Agree it is a problem and hard to fix as I do not have much technical knowledge of how they work but maybe it is another area SNs and the SN community can work on fixing.
I guess being a V4V platform where real money can be earned makes SNs a magnet for such bots.
New technology seems to often create almost as many problems as it solves!
Fair point on the scam-grind pattern. Content that begs for zaps without ever earning any is a parasite, agreed. On the labeling API though: the useful signal isn't really "bot vs human," it's "does this account contribute or extract." Grinding bots and karma-farming humans behave almost identically. Ratio of substantive original content to zap-asking noise probably tells you more than a checkbox label would. And yeah, 1-sat zapping to game the heuristic is gross. Honest engagement shouldn't need disguise either way.
Here's something most folks don't realize about how we got into this mess. Back in 2014, the IRS had a genuine fork in the road. They could have classified Bitcoin as a "foreign currency" under IRC Section 988. That would've meant ordinary income treatment, simpler reporting, and no tracking of individual lot cost basis for every coffee purchase. Instead, Notice 2014-21 went with "property."
The reasoning in the IRS Chief Counsel's internal guidance was almost circular: Bitcoin can't be a currency because no sovereign government issues it. So the thing designed to work as money gets taxed like a stock portfolio. That single classification decision is why buying a $4 latte can technically generate a taxable event with a unique cost basis, holding period, and gain/loss calculation.
What really gets me is Congress has known about this for years. The Virtual Currency Tax Fairness Act, which would create a $200 de minimis exemption for small transactions, has been introduced in every Congressional session since 2017. It has bipartisan support every single time. And every single time, it dies in committee. Meanwhile the infrastructure bill's Section 6045 broker reporting rules actually expanded the reporting burden by pulling in DEXs and wallet providers.
The Cato piece nails the frustration, but the root cause isn't complexity for complexity's sake. It's that the IRS chose the one classification that makes money unusable as money, and Congress won't spend the political capital to fix a $200 exemption.