This whole thing only really works if you're a crypto bull. If you think crypto is here to stay and will go to the moon then yeah, there's no problem borrowing against it, since you expect its value to go up. However, if you're a crypto bear or want to derisk your holdings, this is a terrible idea because you still have exposure to the price of crypto. Selling on the other hand, eliminates your exposure entirely.

If you made 1000+% holding on to crypto (and not selling at any earlier point in time), you're presumably a crypto bull, right?

It eliminates your exposure at the cost of ~25-35% (depending on where you live and potentially up to ~45% if Biden's plan passes), so it only makes sense if you're certain that the market will drop by more than that.

>It eliminates your exposure at the cost of ~25-35%

No it doesn't. Eliminating the exposure would mean your net worth would stay the same regardless of whether it goes up or down. That's the case if you sold your bitcoins, but not if you took out a loan.

The super annoying thing about the Biden plan is that it retroactively affects stuff that happened this year that people weren't planning for. It should be a law that any changes to tax policy kick in the fiscal year after the law is passed.

That's not an annoying thing, that's the whole feature. The point is to prevent people from avoiding the tax - if the tax was announced and not applied retroactively, people would change their behavior to avoid it (or sell right before the tax was raised). That's precisely what you want to avoid to be fair to everyone.

The point of a tax is to redistribute the money a government thinks should be redistributed to account for externalities in the market (and support social / infrastructure programs).

yeah but most taxes don't change from year to year. Moreover, if your year zero advantage is "the point" then, why isn't biden announcing the tax changes in november and ramming them through?

> The point of a tax is to redistribute the money a government thinks should be redistributed to account for externalities in the market

That is not the point of a tax. The point of a tax is to raise revenue for government programs. That includes bombing children on the other side of the world, financing explorations to space, bailing out boeing and goldman sachs, etc. Nowhere in tax law does it say "redistribute to account for externalities in the market". Just because you dream something ought to be so, does not make it so, now or ever.

Well, even more technically, the point of taxes (and QT) is to remove liquidity from the system when inflation gets overheated (since we can print money / have the FED monetize the deficit to pay for our spending if we need to).

Isn't that a bit defeatist? It's like admitting that people will find ways around it. It'll only work in the first year when it's introduced.

Why would you be in crypto if you're a crypto bear?