Quote from: CryptoSites on August 07, 2020, 02:19:54 PM

Most countries will actually tax you upon any trade. BTC to ETH would be considered a sale of BTC to fiat then a fiat purchase of ETH. It gets complicated when you start talking about BTC to LN, especially when it's not your own channel.

If that's the case, then crypto taxation is being unfairly done. Governments should have no jurisdiction over a decentralized, distributed network. If people don't protest against these actions, countries collecting taxes from crypto-to-crypto transactions will continue with the endeavor. I have nothing against crypto taxation as long as it's done in a fair manner. After all, it's the citizen's responsibility to pay his/her taxes to obey the law. Otherwise, you'll be subject to fines or even jail time. While most transparent cryptocurrencies are easier for governments to collect taxes from, they can also do the same with privacy coins if they're traded on centralized exchanges.

As far as the LN goes, it's much easier to tax off-chain Bitcoin transactions because channels are directly linked to LN nodes with publicly available IP addresses. Developers may need to integrate privacy solutions in order to prevent this. But seeing cases where certain developers have been fined by the government (like the case of EtherDelta), could bring a lot of problems to a privacy-oriented version of the LN. It's like developers are being held liable for their actions. This could question decentralization itself as we know it. Just my opinion