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Let me know if I am wrong about using crypto for payments: My understanding is that a big, maybe the biggest, obstacle is taxes. In countries like the USA and
by TekMol 4y ago
Let me know if I am wrong about using crypto for payments:
My understanding is that a big, maybe the biggest, obstacle is taxes.
In countries like the USA and Germany, the way I understand tax law is: When you buy something with crypto, that counts as a sale of an asset. So you have to document what the fair value of the coffee you bought is at that point in time, subtract what you paid for the crypto you used and then pay taxes on the difference.
This makes it more or less impossible to use crypto for payments, right? Every coffee you buy would have to be documented and evaluated and be part of your tax declaration.
- woodruffw 4y agoYour understanding is correct, at least for the US.
- moffkalast 4y agoPeople ended up using crypto as a stock investment instead of as a currency and then they're surprised it gets taxed as a stock investment.
- quelltext 4y agoI mean, it's currency. Trading currency is pretty old, so I doubt anyone was surprised here.
- moffkalast 4y agoYour typical currency is inflationary though, which unlike crypto generally makes it a bad long term investment.
- zeroclip 4y agoPlenty of crypto tokens are inflationary. Some are deflationary. Some are both, based on supply and demand.
- moffkalast 4y agoLet's be frank here, just about most of them are deflationary.
- zeroclip 4y agoBitcoin, sure. Ethereum and it’s many stablecoin tokens, Solana, Polkadot, Tezos, all do not have fixed supply and may be inflationary at times.
- nib99 4y agoat least in Germany after holding 1a you have no tax to pay.
- xiphias2 4y agoWhat you write is a very important part of the equotion. Another part is that implementing improvements to open source payment systems is not as organized as in a top-down company with a great visionary enterpreneur. Blockchains are not practical for payments because they payments are not instantly finalized, so they can't be used for synchronous payments, which makes integrating them to a web site super hard. It seems that the best solution for instant final debit payments is to have a network of payment channels (lightning network inside Bitcoin, but Ethereum has some similar projects as well). Most of the talent is creating new cryptocurrencies/tokens which doesn't really help payments. The remaining talent working on payments is not that big (just a bunch of people really) split to 4 different implementations (in the lightning network case, but Ethereum's implementations also have competing projects) that are compatible but still take a lot of work just to rewrite the same thing in 4 languages. Some of the improvements for scaling lightning network are clear, some are under research (I'm working on implementing min cost flow optimizer into one of the implementations to be able to send large payments on the lightning network, which is not possible right now, but I had to choose an implementation to work on first, as working on 4 implementations is too much).