Canada Revenue Agency To Tax BitCoin Transactions

First time accepted submitter semilemon writes "The Canada Revenue Agency has started paying attention to BitCoin transactions, as it says users will have to pay tax on all transactions using the currency. From the article, "The CRA told the CBC there are two separate tax rules that apply to the electronic currency, depending on whether they are used as money to buy things or if they were merely bought and sold for speculative purposes. "Barter transaction rules apply where BitCoins are used to purchase goods or services," Canada Revenue Agency spokesman Philippe Brideau said in an email. In this situation, that means whatever you've received in exchange for your $1 worth of vegetables must be documented as a taxable gain of at least $1 somewhere. When it comes to trading BitCoins for profit, the tax man says there are tax implications there, too. "When BitCoins are bought or sold like a commodity, any resulting gains or losses could be income or capital for the taxpayer depending on the specific facts," ruled the CRA."

Comments

Re:Kind of innevitable and entirely reasonable

[roman_mir]

Quite the opposite is the case, if there was no way to escape government taxes, if there were no tax havens, if there was no way to move money offshore, where government could not put its hands on it, then all taxes would be much higher.

You are under the wrong impression that government just needs that specific money to operate and if you give it that specific money then government will be satisfied and will do what you think it should do.

Nothing is further from the truth, the truth is that government is a way to extract money from the real economy. Every government worker exists only as a parasite appendage to the real economy, and the more the parasite can extract from the real economy the more it will extract.

All the competition among different tax jurisdictions, and yes, among currencies and different types of money prevent government from attempting to take away all of your money. It is a good thing for the Californians that Texas exists (in the context of States within USA itself) and it's a good thing that offshore tax havens exist, it's a good thing that there are other countries with their own banking systems, it's a good thing that there are competing currencies, including Bitcoin, it's because if there was no Texas and no other countries and no offshore zones and no Bitcoin, etc., the taxes would always go up, government spending would always go up, of-course there is a breaking point, when people stop working above table and go underground into black markets (which exist today and also act as competitive markets to the rigged official economies).

CRA is pro-active, not willing to leave a stone unturned, but they are not going to succeed in this case, many transactions will benefit from the pseudo-anonymity that Bitcoins provide, somewhat similar to anonymity that cash provides, and it's a good thing that the government cannot and will not be able to tax everything.

Re:Kind of innevitable and entirely reasonable

[roman_mir]

Again, you are mistaken, you don't know where you came from and where you are.

USA has a tax that is over 50% on those who actually pay taxes, and those who do not are getting a subsidy that grows the debt and thus the inflation (money printing), which is what is destroying the US economy in the first place. As a percentage of GDP USA government is spending much more than Denmark, because real GDP in USA is not the number that is given to you. That number includes things that have nothing to do with production, that number is absolutely irrelevant and you can't rely on it for anything. Real GDP in USA has been shrinking for over 2 decades now, USA government spends about twice as much money as it collects in revenues and it prints the difference (Fed is not a private bank, it's a government monopoly on fake credit).

Comparing an actual productive output of a country to a made up number is nonsensical, the only thing that should be looked at when all other numbers are nonsense is the trade deficit or surplus, USA has a deficit of 50 Billion a month, Denmark has a surplus, which it uses to pay down its debt (if it didn't finish paying it down yet), so at least in Denmark the taxes are going towards PAYING THE DEBT.

In USA the taxes and all the debt and inflation go toward growing the government.