...and that is why I have a backup connection from AT&T wireless.  Comcast Business works most of the time, but it is cable service. So it fails from time to time. When it works, it is great. But it takes a while for them to roll a truck. Cell service is much more reliable, but not particularly high performance.

.US only worries about Bitcoin as a capital gain if you are TRADING in BTC. IOW, if you buy 1 bitcoin for $US6000, and sell it for $US7000, that is a gain of $US1000 when you sell it, not before.  But if you MINE 1 bitcoin for that is 1 BTC of pure income. Not the same.  If you sit on that mined bitcoin until it is worth $US10000, and sell it, that is pure income of $US10000, but not until you exchange it for USD.  IOW, the price in US$ of BTC when you actually acquire it has no effect on your cost to acquire.

The actual direct cost to mine BTC is zero, it is found money. I bought my miners with USD, and I pay my electricity bill with USD. I can deduct those expenses against my mining revenue, but only after the revenue is converted from BTC into USD,  regardless of what the price was at the time I "found" the bitcoin.  Hopefully I can continue pay the bills from other sources until the BTC price increases to something worthwhile.

The BTC cost for MINING is likely zero.  The cost for TRADING is whatever you paid and sold it for in US$. If you are doing both mining and trading, my suggestion would be to keep separate wallets for each activity.  

Of course.  But that is my opinion, and I'm stickin' to it  lol

What I am doing is not counting it as income at all until it converts to USD. IOW, it doesn't matter to me what the price was when it was mined. Only when I convert it to $.  As long as it sits in BTC, it is not recognized as income to me.  Nobody else has any way of knowing about it until it converts.  Six months of records distilled down to a single entry in Quickbooks (at the current exchange rate, it might be a lot longer ).  Kano and the other pools are not tracked or monitored by the authorities, only the exchanges.

But isn't that a meaningless number?  You need to know what the price is when you convert to USD.  You have to do that on one of the exchanges, because Kano doesn't speak USD (nor do we want him to).

Actually you can. In the AWS LightSail firewall setup, if you allow ALL TCP+UDP, you CAN ping the instance.  But they do not have any other explicit ICMP options.