Re: [IRS] If Bitcoin is property, then the IRS may have a BIG problem!
Depends on what you're using as hardware.
If you have a mining machine that is solely used for mining and absolutely nothing else, then you can easily deduct the depreciation of the machine and the electricity the machine uses (a reasonable recalculation should work for cost of electricity). However, if you have a personal computer that you sometimes use to mine, and sometimes use to go online / watch movies / etc., you're not going to be able to deduct anything for this.
The IRS has been making a big push recently targeting business items that have personal use, which is why I'd advise against anyone trying to deduct the cost of their main computer as a bitcoin expense.
NO!
Bad advice. You cannot ..... This is not a ..., it is an ASIC miner.... You cannot capitalize... Many will do this wrong .... Awesome.
People that don't know enough about ... are giving bad advice all over the place. Stop with the ..., it's not suitable for ....
Yikes! If this is in fact good advice to be listened to, it would be heeded more if it came in a package that is more pleasant to consume.
Quite honestly, even my accountant admits that any advice related to bitcoin is at best guess at best, because bitcoin is so new and the tax/revenue agencies and accounting profession at large are still busy wrapping their heads around it (while they wonder, individually, if they too should buy in
). No one knows the "one true" way to do this, and especially a non-professional (I assume if you're an accountant or similar, you'd say so).I'm not an accountant or CPA, in fact I haven't worked in the financial industry for over 5 years, but I've dealt with plenty of bull. Details are here, as specific as I'll ever get, on my background: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=530299.msg5913035#msg5913035
I know what you mean, I think. I could be more polite, right? Well, the problem is it's very frustrating and damaging to see so much bad advice. I literally had someone compare this to owning a bakery and depreciating on an oven. Some guy who has never mined Bitcoin ever takes one accounting class and learns about depreciation and they think it applies to everything, very annoying to watch it spread and be recited as gospel. The very important rule with capitalizing equipment is that it MUST have a useful life beyond 1 year. Without getting into WHY depreciation is good for real businesses with that type of equipment we can just eliminate the static and just say "no". This ASIC gear, historically speaking, cannot be projected for a useful life beyond 1 year, and therefore it cannot be put on a depreciation schedule. Now, if someone wants to do that they can, but they will end up showing excessive profits that do not really exist. At this point someone would need to try to make a case FOR depreciating because the reasons why not to are so pronounced.
I'm meeting with a CPA tomorrow and should be able to get some feedback.