The Wash-Sale Rule Would Break Crypto Tax Compliance
The legal and practical case against extending the tax code’s wash-sale rule to crypto
The wash-sale rule was designed for a narrow context: securities held as long-term investments, typically within a single account, where taxpayers can deliberately time tax losses without changing their economic...
Software is Speech: Why Regulators Cannot Invent the Missing Middlemen
“i’m sorry that your warrantless surveillance regime was built on the assumption that people would always need intermediaries to transact” — unattributed
“i’m sorry that your warrantless surveillance regime was built on the assumption that people would always need intermediaries to transact” — unattributed Financial regulation has traditionally applied where a person...
Six Ways Congress Can Make Crypto Taxes Work for Everyday Users
The six priorities outlined focus on easing administrative burdens for individual users, aligning crypto tax treatment with longstanding principles in other areas of tax law, and ensuring fairness and neutrality so that cryptocurrency usage is neither penalized nor privileged relative to comparable activity in the traditional economy.
At Coin Center, our mission is to defend the rights of individuals to build and use free and open cryptocurrency networks. Sound tax policy is central to that mission. Without...
Tear Down this Walled Garden: American Values and Digital Identity
A blueprint for American leadership in digital identity built on open standards, federated trust, personal privacy, and individual freedom.
Financial institutions today are burdened by identity verification frameworks that are simultaneously costly, privacy-invasive, and ineffective at deterring illicit finance. Despite vast surveillance systems built on the foundation of the...
Principles for Crypto Legislation
A general introduction to “crypto,” both the underlying technology as well as the larger ecosystem, and a set of principles for legislating in this area to ensure that American rights...
Broad, Ambiguous, or Delegated: Constitutional Infirmities of the Bank Secrecy Act
The Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) allows the Secretary of the Treasury to demand transaction surveillance and reports of personal information from a category of entities defined as “financial institutions.” Originally...
Dilution and its discontents: Quantifying the overtaxation of block rewards
Newly created cryptocurrency tokens dilute the holdings of existing token owners. If block rewards are taxable income at their fair market value at the time acquired, token holders’ income will...
Estimating Bitcoin Electricity Use: A Beginner’s Guide
Summarizing complexities and pitfalls in analyzing the electricity demand of new information technology, focusing on Bitcoin, the mostly widely used cryptocurrency
The rapid emergence of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies has taken many in the energy sector by surprise. This report summarizes complexities and pitfalls in analyzing the electricity demand of new...
A Duty to Answer: Six Basic Questions and Recommendations for the IRS on Crypto Taxes
U.S. taxpayers lack answers to basic questions about the federal tax and reporting effects of transactions involving cryptocurrencies.
U.S. taxpayers lack answers to basic questions about the federal tax and reporting effects of transactions involving cryptocurrencies. Although the Internal Revenue Service has been examining issues related to the...
Electronic Cash, Decentralized Exchange, and the Constitution
An extension of the Bank Secrecy Act to software developers and individual users would be unconstitutional.
Regulators, law enforcement, and the general public have come to expect that cryptocurrency transactions will leave a public record on a blockchain, and that most cryptocurrency exchanges will take place...