Quote from: shinzai on December 01, 2017, 04:25:00 PM

1) What does regulation mean in practice? Is it like they want to register people who invest or something? Is it all about taxes?
2) Why does governments want to regulate crypto?

[...]

In practice it means that regulation compliant cryptocurrency exchanges need to implement AML (anti money laundering) and KYC (know your customer) policies. For ICOs it means that companies and individuals that happen to issue tokens that get classified as security may face criminal charges.

Regulation is mostly about 1) controlling cash flows to avoid money laundering and tax evasion and 2) protecting consumers from investing in scams.

Quote from: shinzai on December 01, 2017, 08:49:10 PM

Quote from: Panfilov on December 01, 2017, 07:29:44 PM

1. Regulation means that government want to controll exchange platforms and their users, as I understand. Also government want to get tax from bitcoin holders (it is different in all contries).
2. Because market is full of scamers. Look at the count of ICO project, amd 90% of it is scam. Their founders only collect money and do nothing else.
3. Yes, it is about ICO and tokens politics. For example, in US all each projects are analysing by SEC and they dicede its mature (shares, bonds, ets)
4. Investors work on regulated marked, so they have more security and freedom. regulators also help investor to deposit only in real projects (if we are talking about ICO).

OK thanks. But regarding taxes.. doesn't most exchanges already comply with government demands of insight?

And because of that, shouldn't governments be able to tax investors on their gains already? At the very least at the moment an investor exchanges back to fiat?

1) As far as capital gains from holding Bitcoin -- and other cryptocurrencies / tokens -- are concerned, those only become taxable after exchanging back to fiat, as from a government perspective you don't realize any losses / gains until you actually sell the respective coin or token.

2) While you can expect most exchanges to cooperate with governments in case of criminal investigations, transferring applicable taxes is not the exchanges' responsibility. It is up to every individual user themselves to correctly report their income according to their local governance. If you fail to correctly report your income and your local government happens to be in touch with one of your exchanges, you might get into trouble.