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Alberta man may be first to sell house for Bitcoin
- jayfuerstenberg 14y agoHope the value doesn't plummet right after the sale. To say that the value of a Bitcoin has been on a roller coaster of late would be an understatement.
- aneth4 14y agoMore of a rocket ship than a roller coaster. I call a top at 120 and back down to 20, all within the next few months. My sell order is at 112.
- damian2000 14y agoIf only it was possible to short sell BC...
- josephagoss 14y agohttps://www.bitfinex.com https://www.bitfinex.com. Edit: In case any one needs a site for shorting (Disclaimer I lend out on this site)
- tlrobinson 14y agoPeople seem to love talking about shorting Bitcoin, and a crash wouldn't surprise me all, but given Bitcoin's meteoric rise recently you'd have to be insane to actually do it.
- tveita 14y ago"Markets can remain irrational a lot longer than you and I can remain solvent." — John Maynard Keynes The best thing to do with bubbles is stay the hell away. Better to put your money in an actual investment with real returns.
- T-hawk 14y agoDo you have any mathematical modeling and insight behind those numbers? Or is it intuitive guessing?
- aneth4 14y agoPure intuition and probably wrong. Better odds than as casino to though. And probably just as accurate as any model.
- chii 14y agoif more and more people/businesses start accepting bitcoin as payment due to the rise in value, it might get propped up due to the general usage (as opposed to speculation, whcih is what is propping up its value right now). The future is unknown!
- mrb 14y agoPfft that is nothing. There is enough market depth that selling $400k of BTC would barely make the market dip from $72 to $68 (which was the market rate twelve hours ago)... http://bitcoincharts.com/markets/mtgoxUSD_depth.html http://bitcoincharts.com/markets/mtgoxUSD_depth.html Edit: oh, you mean for him it would be bad if the market fell.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- fyi80 14y ago5% in one day is quite a drop.
- alexjeffrey 14y agonot for bitcoin.
- marban 14y agoor AAPL
- tveita 14y agoThere was a 7% drop today, and a 5% drop yesterday, and so on and so on, though so far the price has recovered after each one. I think you'd have to be crazy to be either the buyer or the seller of this, unless you were doing it for the publicity. I also wonder if they'd agree on the bitcoin price in advance, or if they would pin it to the dollar value up to transfer. Either way, imagine being the buyer, taking up a loan, maybe buying the bitcoins, and then suddenly not having enough money because the price has gone up/down.
- Lambdanaut 14y agoHaha, that's a horrifying situation. To be safe, it's gotta be best to agree on the house's price IN BITCOINS before sale, regardless of future price fluctuations.
- xyzzy123 14y agoAlso, psychologically I would personally find it hard to accept the idea of my $400k property being worth 26k BTC in say Dec (@15) and 5k (@70) in March. We're not in the 10k BTC pizza days anymore, but still...
- illuminate 14y agoHe'd be cashing out immediately, but this gets his property seen by a great number of people who wouldn't otherwise care.
- tomfakes 14y agoHe could spend some of that new-found coinage on wine from the first North American winery to accept Bitcoin for wine! https://twitter.com/rollingdale https://twitter.com/rollingdale Since they're in BC, they can ship to Alberta too!
- aneth4 14y ago> Since they're in BC, they can ship to Alberta too! Is that right? How does that work?
- ew 14y agoIt's way cheaper to ship something to a neighbouring province than to the US.
- jmspring 14y agoProvince to Province is easy pickin's. Still, the tax on wine in BC (as compared to the states on the west coast) is pretty steep. That said, variety in wine is already worth exploring.
- noarchy 14y agoI'd love it if I could get Alberta liquor stores to ship to Ontario or Quebec, but every one I've checked online won't do it. The same tends to be true for US dealers. There isn't an easy way to get around the price-gouging by the provincial monopolies.
- samstave 14y agoHow are taxes handled with bitcoin?
- adestefan 14y agoThe same way they're handled now. If you make a capital gain at the time you realize the sale, then you better report the gain on your taxes. You can't pay the taxes due in bitcoin, so you better have some real currency on hand.
- gamblor956 14y agoThey aren't. You pay taxes in the currency of whatever nation you owe taxes to. This will necessitate converting bitcoin-denominated transactions to that local currency. (The timing of when the bitcoin transactions may be converted varies from country to country.) Failure to report and pay taxes on bitcoin-denominated transactions is income tax evasion. One consequence of this is that your tax years never "close," so the IRS has until the end of time (or practically speaking, your death) to audit you and go after the unpaid taxes (in contrast to the normal 3 and 6 year periods for IRS audits).
- littledot5566 14y agoMy first reaction was: How is Bitcoin taxed in Canada? After looking around, they indeed are: http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/535/tax-implications-in-canada-of-buying-and-selling-bitcoins http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/535/tax-implicati... "Bitcoin would fall in the same category as foreign currency or barter, and would be taxable. In Canada, barter is sometimes exempt from taxation" It would be interesting to see under what conditions are Bitcoin considered as goods rather than currency.
- mctx 14y agoDo you pay the tax in BC or CAD?
- adestefan 14y agoIf you sold a house for Euros would you pay your Canadian taxes in Euros or CAD? I'm not sure why people are having such a hard time grasping this.
- illuminate 14y agoNovelty-seekers who can't seem to wrap their head around bitcoin being an evolution of existing concepts that've been around since money was invented.
- fyi80 14y agoReal estate is probably covered by another set of laws, as real estate has carefully tracked values, for property taxes.
- adestefan 14y agoA property value for taxation purposes has little to do with it's actual market value.
- Nursie 14y agoAnd near the top of a crazy peak is the perfect time to do this... LOL.
- alexjeffrey 14y agoassuming this is even a peak - the economics of bitcoin are ideal for the price to just keep on rising. That's probably what the seller here's banking on - that the 6-figure dollar-equivalent bitcoins he now holds will be worth 8 figures in a few years.
- Nursie 14y agoIF (and I think that's a big if) bitcoin continues to expand in use, sure. Even then I think what we're seeing now is a speculation-driven local peak that will die down again. You're not trying to tell me that the recent spike is based entirely on a sudden spike in trade are you?
- alexjeffrey 14y agoI completely agree that the current spike will be largely speculative, driven most likely by Reddit and Mega accepting bitcoins now (a PR ploy no doubt). However, the inherent cap on the quantity of coins available means that if a market fit is found for bitcoin, and that market grows, the only way is up.
- tikwidd 14y agoGreat way to sell something, get it in the news.
- hippich 14y agoI did sell my motorcycle back in a days for bitcoins. I posted that ad for two reasons: it was fun and my ad was getting more attention. I converted immediately to dollars, since I was looking for new bike. But still, transaction itself happened with a bitcoins, laptops running linux and console on 'em. :)
- cpursley 14y agoTry this in the US and you can count on a Secret Service raid.
- pyre 14y agoI think that eventually, the government will learn to love BitCoin. Just think of what the states could do to tax law. During an audit, they could require your BitCoin wallet ID to verify that you paid the voluntary sales tax accurately. (Not to mention it would probably be easy to write a program to automatically calculate this from a BitCoin wallet ID for the tax payer when doing their taxes)
- cpursley 14y agoDoubtful. The 'state' is 10 years, or more, behind. Bitcoin is the beginning of the end for the nation-state. The city-state will regain importance and we will see the rise of the virtual replacement of the 'state', which is happening now.
- pyre 14y agoWhen I say "state" I mean the US "states," not the US federal government. The "province" level in Canada.
- cpursley 14y agoI know. I was making a broad statement about the future of government. Bitcoin is a huge threat to tax collection on all levels.
- gamblor956 14y agoNo, it's not. Bitcoin is simply another currency. Governments have been dealing with that for hundreds of years. Bitcoin's fatal flaw is that it is not anonymous. It's even less anonymous than cash. Given enough justification, governments can and will develop systems for tracking bitcoin flows, the same way they already have systems for tracking the flow of paper cash.
- brian_wendt 14y agoRisky business imo. Also, wonder what the IRS would think of that in the US...
- Siecje 14y agoI like how it says "But it has yet to catch on more broadly partly because of concerns around security — bitcoin exchanges are regularly hacked" Which is defiantly not true.
- damian2000 14y agoMtGox did get hacked badly a couple of years ago [1]. People have long memories when it comes to monetary risk. [1] http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/06/bitcoin-price-plummets-on-compromised-exchange/ http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/06/bitcoin-price-plu...