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I've seen this argument against crypto currencies before and I alway found it bizarre. Do you honestly believe that the government's ability to tax you is predi

I've seen this argument against crypto currencies before and I alway found it bizarre. Do you honestly believe that the government's ability to tax you is predicated on it's ability to see how much money you have in your bank account and the ability to take that money? Taxes existed long before electronic records of money.

woodman 11y ago
One of the first income tax evasion prosecutions, follow the passing of the 16th amendment (making income tax permanent), relied almost entirely on bank deposit records. Centralized reporting requirements are pretty important to the IRS. I couldn't find the specific case, but this paper [0] covers the topic pretty thoroughly. If you are incredibly bored and end up reading it, you'll notice that in their investigations the IRS commonly skips a lot of things that would be labor intensive (like finding property held under a different name), and sticks to the prewrapped financial records from the banks. So yeah, taxes existed before the internet - they used paper deposit slips. [0] http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1812&context=fss_papers http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic...