Because of the open nature of the blockchain, the IRS knows all your exact movements, so there's no nudge-nudge-wink-wink especially if you have tied your real identity to a Bitcoin address using a centralized exchange.

Presumably, tools like cointracker (maybe even Visa themselves), etc, will take care of reporting these taxes for you, still a pita, but doable.

> open nature of the blockchain

Only some are open. Take a look at Monero. There's a bounty out to make transactions on it traceable [1].

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25752042

Or maybe nobody really wants to spend Bitcoin because its only use-case is wild speculation and this is just a marketing stunt on Visa’s behalf.

People will spend Bitcoin, grudgingly (remember the pizza? what a fool, never spend your Bitcoin!), thanks to Visa people will actually be able to spend it. Thanks to Visa Bitcoin will not be decentralized anymore either.

Why would you do this unless you literally had no fiat.

Bitcoin’s only killer feature for 99% of people is number go up. If people are hodling and and don’t want to sell, they won’t want to spend it either (it’s the same thing).

If people want to sell, they will just so it on exchange so that they don’t have to go through the hassle of getting fiat back on exchange.

There is literally no advantage to this except for a fuzzy feeling some people might get. Maybe that’s enough, what do I know. But this does not fit in the with digital gold narrative. Nobody walks around with a card trying to pay with fractional gold ounces.

They’re just trying to ride the hype train.

If it keeps going up why does decentralization matter? Poor people are decentralized, I don't know any rich people who are decentralized

That’s what I don’t get too. Here is France the law is similar, and I can’t imagine card holders calculating the capital gains on every transaction. Here it requires taking a snapshot of your portfolio every time because you have to know the total value of the portfolio to calculate the taxable gain.

What people do is take out a loan in USD against their bitcoin, and spend that. This is all done instantly and automatically by various wallet apps that let you spend you Bitcoin as USD.

This is a risk less trade

My CPA added up all my yearly Bitcoin transactions and only filled in one line on that form.. he wrote the dates as "various".

One idea is to average out a bunch of small trades to one made up large trade with the same overall gain. I think it's very unlikely if investigated they'd say we're doing you because you declared a £10k gain when really you made a £10k gain but with slightly different details. At least in the UK. Other places may be more uptight.

Please let us know how that works out for you...

This is true, and a hassle, but not totally insurmountable. For myself, I handle this with a couple of short scripts.

;)