pull down to refresh

Scroll past the first story about DeepSeek—boring! who cares—and there's a lengthy segment on unrealized gains for bitcoin being taxed or not.
It's actually not even that, since the U.S. tax code is pretty adamant on not taxing things before you've realized the profits.
if you buy a bunch of publicly traded stock, and the stock goes up, should you treat that increase as income in your financial statements? The US GAAP answer used to be mostly “no,” but now it is mostly “yes.”
Strange bedfellows in MSTR and Buffett:
And in fact Warren Buffett has been famously mad about this rule for years, saying in 2018 that it “will severely distort Berkshire’s net income figures and very often mislead commentators and investors.”
This is a straightforward set of policy choices: The tax code doesn’t tax unrealized stock gains, but GAAP does count them as income. And so the rules say that you can ignore this bit of GAAP for calculating the corporate alternative minimum tax.
But accounting wise, it's sometimes a different story. So the trouble is whether corporations should count bitcoin gains as income—and then basically as a consequence whether that incurs income tax.

"a lot of what will actually matter is stuff like this, technical tax and accounting fixes to make crypto less disfavored. (Or like the US Securities and Exchange Commission’s decision last week to get rid of Staff Accounting Bulletin No. 121, which had made it hard for traditional financial firms to custody crypto assets."

Nice read. Levine keeps being interesting (#867476)

126 sats \ 1 reply \ @Satosora 29 Jan
Taxing unrealized gains? Will they give you money back on unrealized losses? How much more corrupt can the system get?
reply
By symmetry, yeah they should
reply
38 sats \ 1 reply \ @freetx 29 Jan
I ran into a variant of this bizarre rule recently.
I wanted to donate 1m sats to some charities. Normally I've used thegivingblock in the past, but I wanted to explore Fidelity DAF (Donor Advised Fund) which accepts Bitcoin and then can issue regular checks to any charity. The benefit of a DAF is you get an immediate tax write-off for the full amount, but then you can fund the different charities on whatever schedule you wish.
Going thru the paperwork I came across: "For IRS purposes you will be required obtain an independent qualified appraisal for the value of this transaction...."
So I contacted the rep and I asked him:
"So when I send the BTC, you will sell it for cash right?"
"Yes, which you can then use to pay your charities"
"But why do I need higher someone to 'appraise' that? The value is the value...."
"I know its absurd, but its the rules we have to follow because Bitcoin is still legally considered a collectible....."
These are the types of retardation that is still holding true adoption back. There are just too many hoops to jump thru that serve no purpose other than intentional obstructions.
reply
if bitcoin is considered a collectible then selling bitcoin is not a capital gains event?
Aren't paintings and baseball cards exempt from capital gains tax?
reply
Heads up- I can't seem to zap you.
reply
ah fucksake. Not again (#850716)
I hate this shit.
Ed: nothing in the logs and I tried zapping you (both from mobile and desktop) no problem. Also, received zaps in the last hour + in last few minutes.
Problem on your side, sir?
reply
11 sats \ 1 reply \ @siggy47 29 Jan
Maybe. I checked that first. All my other zaps and comments were fine. In any event, I can zap you now.
reply
reply
Plenty of countries are just waiting to find a way to do this to try and dig the hole they dug for themselves. Taxing unrealised gains is the most criminal and disgusting thing possible
reply
I'm not an economist, but I had an argument with your average "eat the rich" reddit moron. Their argument was that something like this would only effect the wealthy, therefore, it was a good idea.
My counter argument was and still is pretty simple. At the time when the law was made that you have to declare a $10,000 withdrawal from your bank, it was a substantial amout of money, and that law has never changed. Therfore, due to inflation, no matter what bar they use to decide who gets taxed on unrealized gains, it will eventually effect everyone.
A tax on 10 million dollars of unrealized gains today may never effect the average person today, but what about in 20 year? 40? The government doesn't have a very good track record when it comes to easing tax burdens after put in place.
reply