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Arizona Introduces Bill That Would Allow Residents To Pay Taxes In Bitcoin (investopedia.com)
In a bid to attract businesses involved in blockchain and cryptocurrencies, Arizona lawmakers have proposed a bill that would allow the state's citizens to pay their taxes in bitcoin. "Arizona State Rep. Jeff Weninger, who introduced the bill, said it was a signal to everyone in the United States, and possibly throughout the world, that Arizona was going to be the place to be for blockchain and digital currency technology in the future," reports Investopedia. From the report: Weninger, a Republican, also cited the ease of making online payments through the cryptocurrency "while you're watching television," as another reason. But he did not divulge much detail about the implementation of such a system. That might be the reason why Weninger faces an uphill battle in getting the bill approved by the state legislature. Bitcoin's price volatility is already being cited as a possible roadblock to implementing such a measure by state legislators. Arizona state senator Steve Farley, a Democrat who's running for governor, said the bill puts the "volatility burden" of bitcoin's price on taxpayers who make payments in U.S. dollars. "It would mean that the money goes to the state and then the state has to take responsibility of how to exchange it," Farley said.
This is a good idea. I have a significant investment in Bitcoin and this would be a good use for it. I expect massive returns this year on it.
So how does converting a US dollar tax bill amount to bitcoin in real time and providing a payment address, monitoring that payment address for confirmation, and then immediately converting those bitcoins to US dollars make a region a blockchain and cryptocurrencies tech hub? Especially when much of the preceding will likely be outsourced to an existing bitcoin payment processor.
Never going to happen.
I wouldn't be surprised if it's illegal.
I thought it said introduced by "Jeff Winger", so it seemed sort of OK for an episode of "Community". You know how it goes, Greendale starts accepting bitcoin, but it gets bankrupt because bitcoin is worthless 2 weeks after the students make the payments when the transactions (or most of them) actually get through, but then something involving either time travel, or multiverse paradoxes, or claymation happens and the day is saved...
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First, the state will probably have to process the payments through an exchange to avoid the Btc / Dollar bounces. That's not a huge problem, but one analogous to accepting payments in gold or silver.
The second issue I see is that payers will have their payment wallet instantly connected to their real identity. Payers who are careful about security can probably avoid this, but how many will think their previous Btc transactions will be anonymous after they willingly give the state a connection by an accidental security lapse?
I am no Btc expert, so please flay my point if need be.
A dingo ate my sig...
How about a bill letting me pay in Euros, Pounds, Yen, Renminbi, or any other real currencies before letting people pay with BubbleBucks? Assuming that paying in anything other than USD is even federally legal, which it shouldn't be.
Encouraging blockchain or distributed ledger tech businesses to locate in Arizona probably has something to do with Arizona's interest in making use of it's abundant solar energy resources. For worldwide enterprises, we need to have mining and testbed facilities in the States that can compete with countries with lower or subsidized electricity rates.
They could also have the state website pivot to video.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
But $6000 worth of Bitcoin, pay when it's worth $10k and leave the State and the rest of the taxpayers holding the bag when they drop to $3k.
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Thanks for paying your tax bill using bitcoin, and giving us your bitcoin wallet address which we have now linked to your identity.
They out-floridaed Florida!
How about allowing residents to avoid capital gains on anything they sell to pay their taxes? Of course if the law were worded that way, they'd still have to declare capital gains on their Federal tax return.
If you're allowed to pay state taxes in something other than USD, and that something has an unrealized capital gain then the state is effectively allowing you to dodge Federal capital gains... or is it?
I see this being an administrative nightmare and/or going to court, possibly the Supreme Court because it seems like the states might be facilitating some kind of Federal tax dodge. Either that, or there are issues with what is "money" at the Federal level.
It's kind of moot anyway, because how are they going to handle something as volatile as BTC? You can literally go from overpaying to underpaying by a day's wages in seconds.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I wonder if Jeff Weninger happens to own any bitcoins...
I stole this Sig
This is government practicing speculation. Why not just buy stocks using taxpayer money?
says they want to know whom to audit ... assuming crypto still holds any value in the next few years.
Doubt it... This wouldn't necessarily encourage such business to make capital investments in the state - power plant construction contractors don't accept cryptocurrencies, for one, nor do I see them any time soon. And if your claim is that the politician who introduced this legislation has the foresight to realize cryptocurrency mining operations will need to be colocated with solar energy in the future, the burden of proof would be on you to show a quote from him demonstrating such. Then demonstrating how this policy gets to that goal. Because far more likely, "wow cryptocurrency" is a way of looking forward-thinking and business-friendly without using the politically weaponized term "green energy" in a Republican state. Oh, and maybe he's got a few friends who need to offload BTCs that they know will be worthless by the next fiscal year. Money shufflers getting rich off the state (the taxpayers)... Another classic Republican move.
Residents won't get a tax bill for 1.02 BTC. ...
They'll get a bill for a thousand DOLLARS, and they can pay that thousand DOLLARS using a check, Visa, MasterCard, But pay, PayPal
Your tax bill is a thousand DOLLARS. Not a thousand MasterCards, a thousand pesos, or a thousand BTC.
There are many payment processors you can use to pay various taxes. Those payment processors can accept MasterCard as a *means* of transferring dollars, they can accept PayPal, they can accept watermelons if they want to, or gold, gasoline, or BTC. What they deliver to the government is dollars.
There is such a thing as gold currency, gold dollars, produced 200 years ago, but the gold is made of is worth far more than the dollars, so it would be stupid to use those those dollars to pay taxes.
So you then have to pay for two $10 transactions, one to transfer the bitcoin to the state, one for the state to exchange for USD.
I'm not in USA but I can and do pay my taxes with my phone. I could do it from my couch as I'm watching TV. I simply use my banks mobile app to make a tax payment. No transaction fees, instant payment confirmation, easy to use.
Paying taxes with bitcoin is as stupid as paying taxes with shares. Even stupider actually. The sharemarket is much less volatile than bitcoin.
Darn autocorrect turned Bitpay into "But pay".
Bitpay is a payment processor, just like any of the thousand payment processors on the web. Their shtick is that they let people use Bitcoin to pay. Web sites say "we accept Bitcoin" and the order form links to Bitpay. Of course, the prices are in dollars, not in BTC. Customers are using BTC as a method of paying the dollar price.
That's not a big in the mobile site. It's arrogance on Apple's part, combined with a general lack of Unicode support in slashdot.
You can pay a dollar price with a card denominated in another currency, the card issuer will exchange whatever currency you hold into whatever the recipient wants at the time of processing (while also usually adding a fee for the service)...
Does that make euros any less of a currency?
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There are gold dollars made today in the US, no need to go back in time 200 years
Weninger, a Republican, also cited the ease of making online payments through the cryptocurrency "while you're watching television," ...
Um... You can pay by more conventional means like online banking via your phone or PC or any other means (electronic or otherwise) your state accepts while watching TV too. You could even write a check during a commercial. Not really sure how Bitcoin is any easier.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Paying taxes with bitcoin currently is just daft.
Firstly you are declaring outright that you have traded BTC and will have to pay tax.
Secondly you will be losing money to convert to BTC then have the state lose more of your tax money by converting back.
Simply put BTC is currently too slow. If the value changes in transit and appreciates will you be refunded? If it goes down will the state HODL??
Imagine a scenario in which the state has most of its payments in BTC and it needs to pay employees, contracts etc and BTC just crashes 50% - who's gonna pay for that? The tax payer.
Once Lightning Network happens then this may seem less half baked because payments can be instantaneous. So value will not change in transit...but until then.
A 'singular oddity' is an event that cannot be explained and only happens when you are alone.
Popularity - it's a pretty massive undertaking to support the thousands of cryptocurrencies out there, the biggest exchanges only support a few hundred and the volume is so low as to be meaningless. Anyone can download the code for litecoin or even fork the chain of bitcoin while paying themselves 50% of the total in the process of forking, resulting in a new cryptocurrency they can then run up the price on. The government needs some form of stability to be able to accept it as a tax, which is provided by a market large enough to at least sell the things reliably at 10% the advertised value, which is a lot more than you get out of 99% of altcoins.
That $2500 tax bill you paid with bitcoin yesterday was only worth $200 at the time of processing please send a check for the difference.
I was all for cryptocurrency, but this shit is getting out of hand. Can we just stop with it already? Now that it's mainstream, it serves no purpose.
"Currency" comes from currens, present participle of currere. It means "what flows". Same as "current", as in "the current of the river". Currency is the thing that flows through the economy, that everybody uses to buy and sell pretty much everything. Euros are the currency of the EU. South is the current of the Mississippi River.
Bitcoin is NOT legal tender in the USA. While it can be traded, but it's tantamount to paying your taxes in chickens and/ or lawn care. BC is way too volatile and possibly headed to valueless.
There are gold dollars made today in the US, no need to go back in time 200 years
They're beautiful, but who is going to pay anything with them? This one costs $215 to buy from the mint. Face value: $10.
If you want to pay me in those coins, I'd love it.