Horrible properties for a currency. Usual properties for a collectible asset.
Fees may have made this inevitable, but having to deal with taxes has definitely made me much more wary of using it for small purchases. Bitcoin tax accounting is tedious, and I think once a company solves non-custodial record keeping for the purposes of automated tax accounting, it will increase velocity of spending.
You obviously never pay capital gains tax on USD, because it never changes value relative to USD.
AFAIK a Bitcoin is no different than a Euro tax-wise.
[1] The actual rule is $200 of capital gains per transaction, and you'd usually have to spend substantially more than $1000 in a single transaction to get there.
EUR/USD exchange rate changed 3-4% from a year ago, so spending $5-6k in Euros would surpass the threshold (though in this particular case, as a loss).
The BTC/USD exchange rate more than doubled over the past year, so you'd have to spend less than a few hundred dollars to remain under <$200 gains.
The $200 tax exemption would make little practical difference. Even for traditional stable currencies, it's relatively easy to exceed that in any significant use. And with BTC's historical volatility, it's virtually guaranteed.
Am I wrong? Have never held any significant amount of foreign currency, so have never dealt with this personally.
Quick search brought me to https://thismatter.com/money/tax/foreign-currency-transactio... which agrees with that.
Like use tax, I suspect it is often just neglected.
It looks like there may be an exemption for small amounts under $200 (https://smallbusiness.chron.com/foreign-currency-exchange-ta...), which would make Bitcoin much more functional (if it would apply to Bitcoin anyways, mute point as BTC is classified as an asset), but not to the extent of my misconception.
These days, I see bitcoin like the ivory trade. Plenty of it out there, not much public movement, and it is illegal to do with it what everyone wants to do with it. So people are hoarding it while appearing to distance themselves from it for tax/legality purposes. I no longer look into this topic too regularly so this may be a naive thing to say, but there are far more naive people than me out there with money in bitcoin...
How much of M0 is of the total supply
How does everyone walk past good criticisms of bitcoin and bang their head against a wall of the dumbest criticisms ever? I mean specifically holding Bitcoin to a fictional higher standard that no asset satisfies just because they dont respect that particular asset