Quote from: squatter on May 23, 2019, 04:40:48 PM

I disagree. The current guidelines are extremely clear.

I don't agree that they're clear for handling airdrops/spinoffs. The simplest interpretations result in absurd consequences.

Some people have advocated that a spin-off is income at the time it came into existence at its market prices.

Following that kind of absurd interpretation to its absurd ends means that we could bankrupt Warren Buffet, for example, by creating a bitcoin spinoff that traded at $1/coin and also included an output paying 100 trillion coins to his website's SSL cert key... causing him $100 trillion in taxable income.

Someone you have no relationship with handing you cryptocurrency you never asked for and expecting nothing in return -- potentially entirely without your knowledge or even any reasonable way for you to discover it-- should never create an income tax obligation. It certainly shouldn't create an income tax obligation based on some absurd highly illiquid scamcoin market last trade price.

I do agree that its clear otherwise, although _significantly_ inconvenient for general usage. Fixing that will likely take an act of congress: IRS is unlikely to wave tax obligations for small cryptocurrency transactions on their own.

Some of the things people are asking for, like being able to use like-kind exchange to cover swapping between bitcoin and ethereum seem flat out absurd to me. IRS might permit something like that but only if they can't resist showing how ignorant they are about cryptocurrency. The model of treating Bitcoin largely like stock is a generally workable one, and you sure as heck can't do like kind exchanges between unrelated stocks!