Even if you do want to hold long term, you could just replenish what you spend along the way, if it weren't a tax reporting nightmare.
As an individual if you mine you have to record the value as it was at the time of mining if you buy you record it at the time of purchase and you pay capital gains if you exchange the crypto for fiat currency or goods or services directly on the difference between the values. It gets more complicated since you can’t select an individual currency unit form your wallet but atm you are allowed to use creative accounting for that.
The fact that you have an allowance doesn’t mean it’s not taxed and if you have any substantial amount you’ll blow throgh that allowance pretty darn fast.
The same goes for many other assets you pay cgt only when the profit is realized.
* Capital gains in excess of £11,300 * Disposals (sales) in excess of £45,200 * Losses that you wish to claim
https://www.gov.uk/capital-gains-tax/work-out-need-to-pay
Worth noting e.g. if you receive stock under US company schemes and sell even if you have already been taxed on the gain versus FMV as income. You can be in a circumstance where the taxable gain is under the threshold but disposals are high.
The appropriate and interesting applications of crypto seem to be totally leaving p2p cash behind - it just doesn't seem like a good fit.
I do agree that crypto keeps drifting away from p2p cash ... that's a good observation. But I hope people keep shooting at that target.
Incorrect. Decentralization is always more expensive and slower than centralized system(both hypothetically optimal) due to extra sync cost.
I don't doubt Visa will continue to be used, but I imagine it will be for fraud protection rather than cost.
Not to mention since you can't really spend bitcoins you'll have to pay more for conversions to national currencies on both ends.
226 * 100 * 0.0000001 * $17761 = $4.01
With bitcoin, merchant you make payments to can potentially find your wealth, or another can deny transaction to you bwcause you donated somewhere.
These are not doomsday scenarios, this happens today and will happen more if we do not choose privacy.
I doubt one would get rich as Bitcoin creators, but one could still make a killing ....
Edit: And this stands to reason. We're relatively later in the game, and so new contributions are less fundamental by definition.
Because it defeats the point. There is no "coin" that will exponentially appreciate in value, making you a billionaire. There is also no centralisation, so you cannot be the owner of the payment system in the same way that Paypal or Visa are.
At best you can be the Linus Torvalds of your payment system non-profit. Which would be a good gig in itself. But that comes with lots of hard work, not the easy riches that you can do from some hype-pump-dump scam in less than 6 months.
If an instrument stores value, it's an asset, not currency. One can of course transact business with assets, but it's a lot more complicated because you have to agree to a valuation. And without a currency, how do you measure that?
Plus, the incentives for assets and currencies are opposed. Currency exists to be spent, but if an asset is appreciating, you'll want to hold it, not trade it.
Bitcoin was advertised as a currency but it's acting like an asset. (And it's regulated like an asset.)
If you create a new class of asset, you can buy in early, hold on, and get rich on appreciation.
But if you invent a new currency? It's like inventing the inch. Even if everyone uses it, that doesn't give you any more length of your own.
This is being solved by Shapeshift.io and XMR.to. I transact in cryptocurrency all the time using these intermediary services with BTC as the usual medium of exchange. It's opened my skeptical eyes about the future of how things will work.
And it still processes a Bitcoin transaction, correct? So it will be no faster than Bitcoin?
OK, that's fine, but services like that could - and will - get much friendlier. I'm just rebutting the quote which is the blanket "no one transacts in cryptocurrency" which is certainly not true for me, even though I felt that way just 2 months ago. Now that I am an active miner of various currencies, I find myself using it quite frequently for random goods/services, even though the plan was really just to convert it quickly into USD fiat to continue reinvesting into the mining operations or to pocket it.
https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lnd https://github.com/ElementsProject/lightning https://github.com/ACINQ/eclair https://cdecker.github.io/lightning-integration/
Lightning Network has not launched, in the sense of, it is not being used by the community it was designed for. And it never will.
https://medium.com/@lightning_network/lightning-protocol-1-0...
Amen. Too few projects have this focus.