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Things aren't murky with the IRS. That's perfectly straightforward: you must report net gambling income. Things are murky with the legality of transferring mo
by jackpirate 15y ago
Things aren't murky with the IRS. That's perfectly straightforward: you must report net gambling income.
Things are murky with the legality of transferring money via credit card to online casinos, and if the individual gambler is actually breaking the law by participating. Bitcoin resolves that murkiness.
- jerf 15y agoI use the IRS as an example, not the totality of Federal law. To the extent it is illegal to transfer dollars to an online casino, it either is or will be illegal to transfer anything else with market value. BitCoin won't resolve the murkiness one bit. Something I think you may need to understand is that this isn't a remotely new idea. BitCoin may not have existed before, but casino chips, again, literal physical casino chips, to use just one example from a richly populated field, have been around forever, and Federal law does not watch someone trading around chips and just shrug its shoulders and go "Well, golly, I guess those aren't dollars, I'll just walk away I guess." It does something more like "Well, golly, I guess we'll just slap some money laundering charges on too."
- knowtheory 15y agoFirst, individual gamblers are not the target of any sort of federal online gambling regulation. The regulations on online gambling revolve around the accepting and disbursing of funds by online gambling sites. Bitcoins do, and don't address this issue. It does address the issue in so far as it makes transactions between parties opaque, but it also doesn't address the issue if an FBI agent can just sign up for an account and demonstrate the system working for transferring BTC.