... If you avoid exercising any federal privilege in your bitcoin dealings, then you have no obligation to report them. An analysis of Title 26 demonstrating this pretty clearly (and proving it with evidence from the IRS and Treasury) is available at losthorizons.com.
That sounds a lot like the people who say that they do not have to file their taxes because there is no law that says a taxpayer must file their 1040.
They are correct if there is no evidence that they received money from privileged activity, but W2s, 1099s, and the like ARE such evidence and the IRS has the people (incorrectly) producing them send those "information returns" directly to the IRS. It is left up to the victim to set the record straight (with forms 4852, or corrected 1099s) or pay the alleged tax liabilities. So it is like the position you wrote, but qualified and therefore legally valid, as the scans on the website of people receiving refunds shows.
By the way, I don't think the IRS ever points out that the
presumptive legal evidence they receive in the form of W2s and 1099s is the basis of their (correct) position that the victims of their scam are actually legally obligated to file a return. While it is immoral for them to require us to do that paperwork just because they've successfully tricked someone else into providing them with presumptive legal evidence, it is still the laws of the land. It is far less damaging than actually forcing us to pay a tax we don't owe but, as in many cases, their brazen immorality in the first case is tolerated (actually supported by the justice system) because it isn't so onerous. Then they leverage it into the far worse theft (when misapplied, as it generally is) that people call "income tax".