The following is free information for entertainment purposes solely, does not include any specific tax advise, and cannot be used to avoid penalties...

ur welcome.

to be clear, I don't believe I said the non US wife needs to pay US taxes on Thai income. In fact the last post to another poster, I said that if the wife is truly a non US person and the US citizen chooses to file MFS, then the wife's income may be excluded from the US income tax return.

But my overall point in that last post was that, in an audit situation this will be hard to explain, a US citizen not having filed or paid taxes in years, living abroad with no income, with a wife that can buy a 200K car, now you go to the IRS asking for a favorable tax treatment of bitcoin gains. In that type of situation, I do not foresee a favorable encounter with the IRS. Although the rules and the law states one thing, how field agents apply these rules and laws to your specific situation is an entirely different story. In my opinion, if I saw this situation, I know what the field agent would do. He would launch a rectal audit to try to sniff out if you've done anything wrong in the past. Now if you survive that audit because you absolutely haven't done anything wrong in the past, then congrats. It's just like a black kid wearing a hoody walking down the street. He's done nothing wrong, but that doesn't prevent the police from stopping him and asking him questions. Now go and ask how many black kids have been stopped by police having done nothing wrong, but ended up in trouble anyways.

In any event, since I'm ignored , I hope that little story was illustrative and helpful to others who are in delicate tax situations.