IRS Rules Bitcoin is Property and Subject to Capital Gains Tax

BITCOIN IS NOW A TAXABLE ASSET - IRS Says Bitcoins are Property and Not Currency : The Internal Revenue Service has determined that bitcoin will be treated as property, not currency. In its first big ruling on the virtual currency on Tuesday, the IRS said that bitcoin does not have "legal tender status." As a result of bitcoin being regarded as property, it can be treated as capital assets, governed by the same rules as stocks and bonds. In addition, the IRS said that people who receive wages in bitcoins would also be subject to federal income and payroll taxes.




Wading into a murky tax question for the digital age, the U.S. Internal Revenue Service said on Tuesday that bitcoins and other virtual currencies are to be treated, for tax purposes, as property and not as currency.

"General tax principles that apply to property transactions apply to transactions using virtual currency," the IRS said in a statement, meaning that bitcoins would be taxed as ordinary income or as assets subject to capital gains taxes, depending on the circumstance.

Bitcoin, the best-known virtual currency, started circulating in 2009. Its present market value is around $8 billion, with up to 80,000 transactions occurring daily, according to accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP.

Recent incidents have brought the currency under new regulatory scrutiny, such as the failure of Mt. Gox, a Tokyo-based exchange that filed for bankruptcy after losing an estimated $650 million worth of customer bitcoins.

Unlike conventional money, bitcoin is generated by computers and is independent of control or backing by any government or central bank, which its proponents like, but which also has led to calls for more guidance on U.S. tax treatment.

The IRS supplied that in its statement, which dealt a blow to bitcoin "miners," who unlock new bitcoins online. The IRS said miners must include the fair market value of the virtual currency as gross income on the date of receipt.

This change "is a disincentive to start looking for bitcoins," said John Barrie, a partner with law firm Bryan Cave LLP, who advises charities that receive bitcoins as donations.

NOT LEGAL TENDER

The IRS also said that virtual currency is not to be treated as legal-tender currency to determine if a transaction causes a foreign currency gain or loss under U.S. tax law.

"The character of gain or loss from the sale or exchange of virtual currency depends on whether the virtual currency is a capital asset in the hands of the taxpayer," the IRS said.

However, when virtual currency is held as inventory or other property mainly for sale to customers in a trade or business, ordinary gains or losses are generally incurred, the IRS said.

Capital gains and losses are taxable and deductible at different rates and amounts than ordinary gains and losses.

Democratic Senator Tom Carper, who chaired a Senate committee hearing last year on bitcoin, said in a statement that the IRS guidance "provides clarity for taxpayers who want to ensure that they're doing the right thing and playing by the rules when utilizing bitcoin and other digital currencies."

A man who was traveling through Manchester, New Hampshire was stopped and harassed by the TSA after he opted out of going through a body scanner. The official reason for further interrogation, according to the screeners, was "We saw Bitcoin in your bag and need to check."

For anyone living under a rock, Bitcoin is a virtual currency. It does not exist in physical form. Saying you had seen bitcoin in a bag would be like saying you had seen email in a bag -- it makes no sense.

Which is why Davi Barker, a Libertarian blogger who was returning from the New Hampshire Liberty Forum, was somewhat befuddled at the situation.

The Federal Reserve Board doesn't have the authority to regulate bitcoin, Fed Chair Janet Yellen said Thursday.

"To the best of my knowledge, there's no intersection at all in any way between bitcoin and banks the Federal Reserve has the ability to supervise or regulate," Yellen told members of the Senate Banking Committee. "The Federal Reserve simply does not have authority to supervise or regulate bitcoin in any way."

Satoshi Nakamoto, the alleged Bitcoin founder who was outed yesterday by Newsweek, did classified work for the U.S. military and major corporations, a fact that will sit uncomfortably with many Bitcoin proponents should it be confirmed that Nakamoto is indeed the father of the cryptocurrency.

Stefan Molyneux -- Bitcoin, Internet Freedom and Liberation

Stefan Molyneux is interviewed by Luke Rudkowski of We Are Change on Bitcoin, Internet Freedom and Liberation at the Texas Bitcoin Conference.
IRS has deemed Bitcoin to be a commodity not a currency. It will be taxed now!

The Fall of Bitcoin | Jesse Ventura Off The Grid - Ora TV

The market will always move to more efficiency, Bitcoin is far more efficient than the current system of banking and payments. Sorry, Jesse, we love you, but you should interview a bitcoin expert before commenting at all. With complicated topics like bitcoin, it's easy to sound stupid when it's misunderstood.



The Fall of Bitcoin | Jesse Ventura Off The Grid - Ora TV

Can we trust cryptocurrency? Today, Jesse Ventura tackles the Bitcoin on #OffTheGrid. After Silk Road was seized and Mt. Gox closed, should we invest our hard-earned cash in the peer-to-peer decentralized digital currency? Tell the Governor what you think! Message him at ora.tv/offthegrid/askjesse.

Stefan Molyneux on Bitcoin, Internet Freedom and Liberation

Stefan Molyneux and Luke Rudkowski Bitcoin, Internet Freedom and Liberation



The nature of BitCoin is that it is the world's first "decentralized IPO". What this means is that anyone who has any BitCoin is a shareholder in the network and has a vested interest in protecting it, whether by prefering BitCoin or by actively coding new features or dealing with attacks. We are all one company of men and women with a vested interest in a new money system, growing exponentially in numbers. It has the good elements of socialism (ie common good) without the central control, democide and sacrifice of freedom...
BitCoin could not have been conceived by the "NWO" otherwise the likes of Apple would not be banning wallets and the central bankers would be cheer-leading for BitCoin. However, I am certain they are working overtime to figure out how to corrale it, first, then leverage it for the globalist agenda. This is unlikely given the architecture of BitCoin.

IRS Wants to Tax Bitcoin

March 25 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. government will treat Bitcoin as property for tax purposes, applying rules it uses to govern stocks and barter transactions, the IRS said in its first substantive ruling on the issue. Matt Miller reports on Bloomberg Television's "Bottom Line." (Source: Bloomberg)

Bitcoin Exchange CEO Commits Suicide

"A young American CEO who apparently committed suicide in Singapore was involved in the world of the bitcoin, but was also struggling with other issues prior to her death, friends and colleagues said.

Autumn Radtke, chief executive of virtual currency exchange First Meta Pte Ltd, was found dead on February 26. Police said they were investigating her "unnatural" death, and "preliminary investigations showed no foul play is suspected."

Neighbors said they thought Radtke jumped to her death from a residential apartment complex near her home."* The Young Turks hosts Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian break it down.

Gerald Celente -- Bitcoin, Economic Turmoil and Revolution in 2014

In this video Luke Rudkowski interviews business consultant Gerald Celente on the upcoming future U.S economy and revolutionary trends for 2014. Gerald Celente is an American trend forecaster, publisher of the Trends Journal, business consultant and author who makes predictions about the global financial markets and other events of historical importance.





Here's a revolution that would stop the New World Order. Allow people to establish their own nations based on common beliefs, like what was supposed to happen with the original American colonists before they lost that freedom to the "More Perfect Union" Divide and Diversify! Be Free, Get what you want, don't settle for compromise, don't drop your differences.

ALERT -- Bitcoin Plummets as MtGox Continues to Halt Withdrawals

The price of bitcoin continues to fall on Monday after Tokyo-based bitcoin exchange MtGox said the virtual currency contains a bug that allows for fraud. MtGox said the bug causes problems when customers try to make transactions to a third party. The exchange said the bug makes it appear that the transfer did not go through, which can prompt multiple transfers unintentionally on behalf of the sender. The exchange halted bitcoin withdrawals over the weekend and said on Monday that withdrawals would not be allowed to resume until the issue has been properly addressed.

BITCOIN CRASH as MT. GOX Stops All Withdrawals - Does the ELITE Want BITCOIN Gone?

A temporary halt on withdrawals from the bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox on Friday and subsequent price decline have prompted trading platform SecondMarket to start a pilot program to buy and sell bitcoin, a move it says highlights the need for a major U.S.-based bitcoin exchange.

SecondMarket, which made its name as a platform that allowed investors to trade shares of Facebook Inc. FB before the company went public, has established itself in the bitcoin space through its open-ended bitcoin trust.

There is no major bitcoin exchange based in the U.S., even as U.S. investors are pouring millions into domestic bitcoin start-ups and U.S. companies are beginning to adopt the virtual currency as payment.

Mt. Gox, which is based in Japan, isn't even the largest bitcoin exchange. The largest by 30-day volume is Bitstamp, which based in Slovenia, according to data from bitcoincharts.com. The second-biggest is BTC-e, which appears to be based in Bulgaria. Mt. Gox is third.

"The single most important thing that we can do...is get some serious exchanges established here in New York," Circle's Allaire said at the hearing. Circle is a company that aims to make bitcoin payments easier for merchants.

There are companies working on establishing bitcoin exchanges in New York, but witnesses at the hearing pointed to the regulatory uncertainty and reluctance from banks to work with bitcoin companies as major hurdles.

In recent trade, bitcoin traded at $741.30 on the bitcoin exchange Bitstamp and $763 on Mt. Gox. That's a decline from trading around $900 earlier this week on Mt. Gox and in the early $800s in the same period on BitStamp. Here's a two-month chart of prices on Bitstamp:

Russian authorities have issued warnings against using Bitcoin, saying the virtual currency could be used for money laundering or financing terrorism and that treating it as a parallel currency is illegal.
Reddit, Virgin Galactic, and Overstock.com now accept Bitcoin.

So do dating site OKCupid and travel site CheapAir.com. Game giant Zynga is now in the testing phase. Two big Las Vegas hotels accept Bitcoin. Already, 21,000 merchants are using Coinbase to accept Bitcoin from customers.

(And you can use Bitcoin at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Crate & Barrel, Target, Sears, CVS, Hyatt Hotels, Kohl's, Burger King, Applebees, Victoria's Secret, Land's End, Facebook, Groupon, Banana Republic, the Gap, AMC and Fandango movie theaters, Whole Foods, Wine.com, Wine Enthusiast, Papa John's, Nike, Adidas, Sephora, Sports Authority, Staples, Zales jewelry, Game Stop, FTD flowers, Zappos and hundreds of other stores if you use Bitcoin to buy gift cards at Gyft.) bitcoin

Andy Haldane -- Executive Director for Financial Stability at the Bank of England -- believes that peer-to-peer internet technology will lead to the break up of the big banks.
Visa has attacked Bitcoin as being less trustworthy than its well-established payment system.

JP Morgan Chase has filed a patent for a Bitcoin-like payment system. And Russia's largest bank is working on a Bitcoin alternative as well.
Ben Bernanke and the Department of Justice have both cautiously blessed Bitcoin. While crypto-currencies remain insulated from central bank manipulation, governments have thus far been tolerant, perhaps because their capability to track transactions is more advanced than Bitcoin believers admit.
Indeed, Bitcoin is not really that anonymous, as the NSA can track Bitcoin trades.

Few protests elicit the same collective gasp from the internet as smashing up an iPhone, so the device-mutilating fury of some members of the Bitcoin community has plunged Apple into a new controversy over policies in its App Store. btc china Imagine a world in which you can buy anything in secret. No banks. No fees. No worries inflation will make today's money worth less tomorrow.

The digital currency Bitcoin promises all these things. And while it's far from achieving any of them — its value is unstable and it's rarely used — some have high hopes.

Russia Bans Bitcoin -- The Bill Still Report

Russia has banned Bitcoin, but the US Postal Service may open Bitcoin centers.




Bitcoin is backed by people who're using it. Even biggest Chinese exchange accepting it. What drives those people to use it? The faith that the currency won't be closed under any circumstances because it is decentralized.
A dollar means nothing. It only means something because you believe it means something. These currencys are called FIAT currencies. Our dollar used to be worth gold but Nixon got rid of that, therefore we print a shit ton of it because there is no intrinsic value. If you had one pound of gold and had 100 dollars each dollar would be worth 1/100th of a pound. By printing 900 more dollars you deflated the value of the other dollars. Most money today are just numbers on computers, like 90%

Forget Mining BITCOIN, Start MINING LITECOIN with Home Built LITECOIN MINING RIG

The era of Bitcoin mining on the GPU is dead. A year ago, a single Radeon graphics card could crank out a reasonable fraction of a Bitcoin in a single day. Today, that same GPU earns a thousandth of a Bitcoin in 24 hours, generating little value while consuming a substantial amount of power. The shift to ASICs for Bitcoin mining mirrors the shift from CPUs to GPUs, but the market isn't content to just turn those mining rigs off — not when there's an alternative currency available for which ASIC miners do not exist.

That alternative is Litecoin — and there's reason to think that buyers have emptied the shelves of AMD's Radeon hardware to build mining platforms. First off, there's the fact that you can't find a high-end Radeon in stock at the moment. Newegg and Amazon are both out of stock, while over at Amazon, the lowly AMD Sempron 145 — a single-core, 2.8GHz chip with a $29.75 price — is the 5th most popular CPU.

Further proof of this trend is the Litecoin network hash rate, is shown here:

Clearly Litecoin miners are coming online, and they're coming online en masse. Many of these are undoubtedly Bitcoin miners switching over now that GPUs are no longer cost effective, but some of these systems are probably driven by new miners.

Litecoin confirms transactions faster (every 2.5 minutes, rather than every 10 minutes for Bitcoin) and it contains more coins — 84 million coins will be found in total under the LTC protocol, as opposed to 21 million for BTC. Bitcoin and Litecoin prices tend to move together; Bitcoins stratospheric leap over the past month (it's down from a high of $1200 but trading at $873 as of this writing) has created an odd situation where it's easier to mine Litecoin and then convert LTC to BTC then it is to just mine BTC to start with.

Why bother installing CPU-mining malware on thousands of machines, when you can just break into someone's Amazon cloud computing account and create a well-managed datacentre instead?

This week, a software developer discovered someone had done just that, and made off with a pile of litecoins on his dime.

Melbourne-based programmer Luke Chadwick got a nasty shock after receiving an email from Amazon. The firm told him that his Amazon Key (a security credential used to log on to Amazon Web services) had been found on one of his Github repositories.
 backed extension cable shenzhen msi r9 280x how to build a litecoin rig namecoin crypto mining high risk profit
Litecoin vs. Bitcoin, who win? It is more like a comparison between gold and silver. These are the top two cryptocurrencies by market cap if you don't include Ripple (XRP). Recently Bitcoin (BTC) had a market cap of $8.48 billion and Litecoin (LTC) was at $485 million.

Litecoin is based upon the Scrypt hashing algorithm and Bitcoin is based on SHA256D. Miners are incentivized with bounties. For each Litecoin found the current reward is 50 LTC and the maximum number of coins in exisitence is capped at 84 million. For each Bitcoin discovered, the reward is down to 25 BTC and will continue to be halved on a regular basis until 2040 when the maximum supply is reached capped at 21 million.

Mining cryptocurencies is a post in itself. Briefly, it involves using freely dwnloadable software run on dedicated hardware or cloud computing power to solve complex calculations. The calculations get harder over time and the rewards get reduced as well. Miners are rewarded or discovering blocks which are added to a block chain every 10 minutes. Currently it may make more financial sense to try to mine LTC rather than BTC.

BitCoin & Other Cryptocurrency Explained

Leo explains what Cryptocurrency is, including BitCoin and Dogecoin, and whether or not it holds any real value.



 Bitcoin is backed by a network of hundreds of thousands of computers constantly updating the blockchain, unlike the dollar. Bitcoin has value not just because we decided so. It's protocol is a value transfer system, it has a competitive advantage over current fiat currency because transactions are done peer to peer, require no third party and have no fees. Retailers who accept bit coin immediately bypass that 3%.

Bitcoin is doing to banking what napster did to the music industry.

And FYI the Chinese are still happily buying bitcoins, they just can't do it with the yuan. China is willing to let them send their shitty USD back to America in exchange for this emerging asset class





The federal reserve is a privately held foreign corporation, that is not part of the federal government and has no reserves. They make digital digits
we call money but is really currency.  We pay interest on that currency, yet they place no collateral for that currency. Only Gold of Silver is
money, because it have a store of value, Currency (ie paper money does not). That is why the Federal Reserve is unconstitutional because money must
be made of gold or silver and be created by Congress

All about BITCOIN

PROJECT CAMELOT: LIVE WITH PALADIN ON BITCOIN & SUPERBOWL .Kerry Cassidy talks with Paladin from the White Hats (currently a columnist here on the Camelot site), all about BITCOIN..why it differs from fiat currency and the efforts of the PTB to stop it from replacing our monetary system. Paladin is uniquely qualified to weigh in on this topic as a forensic financial investigator with a background in corporate and government agency contracts. As a member of the website responsible for the investigation and publishing of a number of reports following the money into black projects and down the rabbit hole (http://tdarkcabal.blogspot.com/ ) his views of this current challenge to the corrupt monetary system should be fascinating and enlightening to those who will take the time to listen.
UPDATE: We will also be discussing the recent Terror Bowl letter that has been circulating around the internet for the last few days regarding a possible false flag event. There are some interesting nuances with this that again, Kerry and I have discussed in the past and the synchronicity of this letter demands that we discuss them. --Paladin

Bitcoin Becoming The Sovereign Currency for Native Indians

Payu Harris from Pine Ridge Reservation in the USA talks on the plan for native American Indians to use Bitcoin.

Bitcoin Becoming The Sovereign Currency for Native Indians




The regimes of central banking, the financial institutions who hold power and who's power is rooted in the ability to issue currency, control its value, manipulate the flow of wealth and through all of it CONTROL the populations HATE Bitcoin. They hate it just as they hate gold and silver. Therefore it will forever be under assault and attack. The pressure will not let up. There will be dark and hidden cyber wars, covert assaults, digital special forces missions where digital commandos and digital drones with bombard any individual or institution that holds, issues, or has any part of bitcoin. The resume and track record of investment/financial vehicles similar to bitcoin is very clear. They are attacked repeatedly.

Bitcoin Is The Financial Smelling Salts For Humanity – By Jason Liosatos

Bitcoin is fast becoming a major contributor to the awakening of human beings, shaking us from our deeply seated conditioning and indoctrination that the paper, gold, silver, and metal currencies are our only choice. Bitcoin is reminding people that they have been forced into a financial system of slavery, a virtual prison system controlled by governments, which leaves people and populations with very little room for manoeuvre, and very little chance of escape, trapping them literally from cradle to grave.

Bitcoin

It is almost unbelievable to think that the Governments and money masters have had such an unchallenged financial control over people for so long, but evidently that is now coming to an end, as we see a very real chance of Bitcoin and other currencies usurping our brutal money system as we know it, changing it forever, and creating another trajectory for human beings, hopefully towards a more symbiotic relationship with ourselves, each other, and the world.
Bitcoin, and other online, virtual currencies are an escape tunnel from the prison of debt that has held people to ransom for generations, and it is magnifying the already powerful consciousness awakening taking place, psychologically, physically and spiritually, which is long overdue, and once people realize they can escape the governments financial strangle hold I believe people will then want to be completely free themselves from all Government control, to escape its vice like grip completely.
Necessity is the mother of invention, and there has been an urgent necessity for a global currency that is completely independent from government control, and it is no coincidence that Bitcoin has been born at a time when people world wide are absolutely desperate and exhausted by the current money system, which is designed for debt, and based on fear and short term greed, not freedom. There is no doubt people want to be free from the traps of conventional money as we know it.

Banking on the Bitcoin Boom

On The Stream: The potential benefits and risks of the internet's most popular digital currency, Bitcoin.

Bitcoin Myths Exposed! - A Conversation with Erik Voorhees

Bitcoin has several persistent myths about it that just refuse to die. Stefan Molyneux and Erik Voorhees dispel the myths and talk about the reality of the predominant cryptocurrency.

Erik Voorhees is the co-founder of Coinapult, worked as Director of Marketing at BitInstant, and was founder and partial owner of the Bitcoin gambling website SatoshiDice.

Bitcoin Revolution ~ U.S. Moving to Make Electronic Currencies Illegal ?

January 10, 2014 : http://americanfreepress.net

Bitcoin

• Alternative currency makers defend motives at hearing

By Mark Anderson

Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Tom Carper (D-Del.) recently held a first-ever congressional hearing on virtual currencies. The mid-November hearing, “Beyond Silk Road—Potential Threats, Risks and Promises of Virtual Currency,” explored the positives and negatives for the federal government and society related to currencies that have been created in electronic format on the Internet.

Carper, who described virtual currencies as “digital cash that can be used and transferred nearly anonymously,” added in a press release that this monetary technology “presents some new and unique risks, but with it . . . great potential. The federal government and society as a whole need to come together to figure out how to effectively deal with it.”

Witnesses at the November hearing included representatives of the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), Department of Justice, Department of Homeland Security and private industry representatives including the Bitcoin Foundation and the International Centre for Missing & Exploited Children.

Bitcoin has become increasingly popular on the Internet. It is electronic currency that has been created using complicated computer programs and cannot be forged or counterfeited.

Patrick Murck, Bitcoin Foundation’s general counsel, described Bitcoin as “a decentralized store of value and open-ledger payment network that operates securely, efficiently and at low cost without the need for any third-party intermediaries.”

Understanding Bitcoin - A Beginner's Guide (With Help from Wikipedia)

Wikipedia's a great place to start when you want to learn about anything. Trouble is bitcoin is so novel, that most people get even more confused when they read the Wikipedia page. With terms like double spending, decentralized computing and cryptocurrency, it often feels like one might need a PhD just to read wikipedia. Our humble goal is to help you get through the first paragraph and get a full grasp of these terms. So, sit back, relax, in due time you'll be understanding this amazing new currency like a bitcoin insider.



This episode (number two) focuses on THE BLOCK CHAIN. What's amazing is that this central term was left out of the Wikipedia paragraph entirely. It would be like talking about Albert Einstein and not mentioning Relativity or E=mc2.

Jim Rickards on Bitcoin, Gold, and Fed Printing Money, QE

Jim Rickards is a counselor, investment banker and risk manager with over thirty years’ experience in capital markets. He is currently Senior Managing Director at Tangent Capital Partners LLC, a merchant bank based in New York City, and is Senior Managing Director for Market Intelligence at Omnis, Inc., a technical, professional and scientific consulting firm located in McLean, VA. He advises the Department of Defense, the U.S. intelligence community, and major hedge funds on global finance, and served as a facilitator of the first ever financial war games conducted by the Pentagon. A frequent guest on financial news programs, Rickards is also the author of Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis.