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Finland tax authorities matching Bitcoin transactions and bank transfers
- ForHackernews 9y agoHaving an immutable public ledger should make collecting taxes easier.
- wereHamster 9y ago…if you can match addresses to people.
- grey-area 9y agoPretty trivial for a nation state, given sufficient motivation.
- StavrosK 9y agoNot if it's something like Monero.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- anonymfus 9y agoGood reason to ban Monero
- VMG 9y agoGood reason to buy Monero
- acdha 9y agoThey can still require mandatory reporting when real money enters and leaves the system. Everyone is going to need to convert currency into Monero or vice versa and governments routinely require disclosure information at such points.
- StavrosK 9y agoYes, for sure. But there can be a secondary market if people accept Monero directly, so you don't have to convert.
- acdha 9y agoSure - just as cash and barter have allowed for millennia, but there’s an upper bound before that draws attention. Your landlord or supermarket have too much to lose if they help you cheat on your taxes. With a digital transaction record keeping is less burdensome, too, so it’s more likely that if a substantial number of people started using cryptocurrencies the tax authorities would simply require reporting both sides of the transaction so they could confirm that the other party is reporting accurately as well.
- JumpCrisscross 9y agoIt always surprises me how casually crypto currency enthusiasts treat wilful money laundering and tax fraud.
- StavrosK 9y agoThe scenario you had in mind was money laundering and tax fraud? Mine was an oppressive government trying to dictate where you spend your money.
- acdha 9y agoOften with palpable enthusiasm, right before whining about the assumption that most non-speculative transactions are illegal.
- cfadvan 9y ago
- Sangermaine 9y agoThis isn't a new problem for tax authorities, it's an old and solved one, despite the shiny new technological wrapper. If you're making a lot of unreported income, there are ways for the tax authorities to know, in the same way they do with income from illegal activities that you're not reporting or large amounts of cash payments you're hiding, or just unreported income in general. They don't need to match your identity to your Monero addresses. If you're using your Monero in any way that interacts with the real world they're going to ask where the money in your accounts came from, where the money for these assets you've been buying but don't seem to have a way to afford came from, where the money for these investments you've been making came from... Even if you can somehow obtain things without converting out of the cryptocurrency, you're still acquiring assets, investments, and the like that require registration and disclosure, which will then lead to the same questions. Paying your monthly rent directly in cryptocurrency? If anyone audits or investigates you're going to have to explain how you're affording it when your reported income doesn't seem to support it. And the sellers/landlords/etc will themselves have records, so you better hope they're also completely committed to protecting you if they themselves get audited or investigated.
- sametmax 9y agozerocoin and private send is going to make that pretty hard.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- test6554 9y ago...and if no assets are kept off the books
- DoctorOetker 9y agoI fully agree. The whole idea of income tax is flawed. Define richer (poorer) as having more (less) wealth: unit is say dollars. Define net income as the time-derivative of wealth: unit is dollars per day. Now conflate income and wealth in school. Justify taxing income as if it was redistribution from rich to poor, while it is in fact redistribution from high incomme to low income: i.e. a rich person with substantial capital, who has lost his job, can apply for income support, even though he still has money in the bank. In order to get out of poverty a poor person has to earn money at a faster rate than average, so will be heavier taxed. Income taxation is not a redistribution from rich to poor, it is a means to slow down changes to the status quo. It is a brake on social mobility. With decentralized ledgers, we can easily tax all wealth equally by printing money. The problem is not that money is being created out of thin air, but that this freshly minted money is not considered property of the group, instead it is property of the central banks, which act like unions for private banks. Taxing by freshly minting is much cheaper to implement, and removes the whole legal loopholes with secret walkthroughs etc. i.e. people can focus on providing a service and earning money (roughly twice as fast since no income taxation) instead of puzzling through all the rules and exemptions in order to be able to do their job.
- klez 9y ago"The taxman"? The original title was "Tax authorities in Finland matching Bitcoin transactions & bank transfers to collect tax on crypto trading profits".
- StavrosK 9y agoYes, but "the taxman" makes you click so you can see if it's your taxman.
- s73v3r_ 9y agoOr if you're a Beatles fan.
- thisisit 9y agoHN has a character limit on titles. The original title is 34 characters longer than HN limit. So, people try and edit the title and submit the story. Sometimes these edits don't work very well. So let's cut OP some slack. Maybe Mods can edit the title again.
- ballsyballsman 9y agoI'm pretty sure all bitcoin fanatics are going balls out on this one..
- akerro 9y agoOnly those who avoid paying taxes. A lot of people WANT TO PAY TAXES from Bitcoin.
- AznHisoka 9y agoEven more people will be paying less taxes from bitcoin in 2019 because of capital losses.
- VMG 9y agoBitcoin fanatics know how to deal with Government enthusiasts
- lindig 9y agoBitcoin proponents like to stress the rationality of their investments and deny that it is gambling or an asset only fit for the black market - hence the large potential. So they surely would take taxation into account.
- hedgew 9y agoAll they're doing is looking for bank transactions to crypto exchanges in citizens' accounts. What this article doesn't tell, is that the current cryptocurrency taxation in Finland is unreasonable. You pay 30-34% tax on any profit, but you can not deduct losses. If you had bought 1 BTC at $1000, another at $14000, and sold both at $3000 you would owe $600 in taxes even though you lost $9000. You can imagine how people feel about paying these taxes, when they are so obviously flawed and unjust. Some people may owe hundreds of thousands in taxes even if they made no actual profit.
- AznHisoka 9y agoJesus, you can’t deduct losses? If it is only for crypto, I gotta believe its a perverse way to dissuade citizens from investing in crypto. These crypto tax articles become less and less relevant in the coming tax year as people are going to be filing losses, not gains. I expect headlines like “How to make sure you add up your crypto losses to the full amount”
- madshiva 9y agoPeople should invest in people that are close. You can't deduct gambling losses only winning (on my country) and this is right.
- anc84 9y ago> investing in crypto LOL
- bitreality 9y agoCrypto is a legitimate investment. It's an entirely new asset class. If you think it's going away anytime soon you're delusional. 5 years ago you could buy 1 BTC for $100 USD. And at that point it wasn't even new. 1 year ago you could buy 1 ETH for about $50. The average person would struggle very hard to find any investment that goes 80X in 5 years, or 12X in one year. With Bitcoin and crypto, lots of regular people have made returns they could never dream of on the stock market.
- RantyDave 9y agoI believe this is called "competent". I know we don't see much of it but ... there it is.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- tallanvor 9y agoIt sort of sounds like they're treating Bitcoin transactions like a non-EEA lottery. If you win, you pay your taxes, and if you lose you don't get to deduct the cost of your ticket. Honestly, this doesn't bother me.
- jabgrabdthrow 9y agoDo you also get taxed if paid in bitcoin Why not just do a 10% wealth tax on all of a person's assets on top of their income tax
- Hamuko 9y agoIncome is always taxed, so yes, you would get taxed.
- tallanvor 9y agoI'm not in Finland or an expert on their taxation rules - my statement was based on a quick read of some of the information I found, but I would assume that if you chose to get paid in bitcoin than yes, you would have to determine the value of the bitcoin when you received it and pay taxes on it. When you cashed it out you would either have to pay taxes on the gains or eat the losses.
- test6554 9y agoWealth taxes ignore property rights. When something is yours, it should stay yours unless you agree to part with it.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- kazinator 9y ago> The old truth seems to stand: You can't avoid death or taxes. Even if there were nothing but cryptocurrency, tax authorities have ways of estimating someone's income from investigating their lifestyle. That is to say, find people who are leading lavish lifestyles (living in upscale neighborhood, driving expensive cars, taking expensive vacations, ...), yet claim low income. That's just very inefficient to do if you have to actually put gumshoes onto individual people because you have no electronic access to any transactions.