Very interesting. The Roger Ver guy doesn't sound like a random target.
Make no mistake. This indictment has nothing to do with tax evasion. It’s a witch hunt against a man who turned his back on US wars and malicious foreign and domestic policy. Roger is a supporter of Julian Assange and press freedom not just with words but with actions. He’s a popular speaker at crypto events around the world where he educates people about the injustices caused by the US Govt.
Roger spoke out against mass surveillance, endless wars and the murder of innocent people for profit. He funded many good causes against US imperialism and that’s why they target him. At every opportunity Roger spoke about why he left his US citizenship behind and a wave of successful Americans followed his example. The US Govt has lost hundreds of billions because Roger was leading the way for many successful entrepreneurs who followed his example.
This is a malicious attempt to vilify Roger and to punish him for exposing and opposing the crimes of US empire.
For sure, but I would say the timing is not random either. There is a lot of punches and counter-punches being thrown in the Financial theatre of this war, and I think this has to do with the DS attempts to take control of BTC.
They already took over BTC a long time ago. Roger was on the forefront as he saw it happening and tried to stop it. He just released a book about it - Hijacking Bitcoin.
The fork was the result of the Core developers refusing to increase the block size and insisting on implementing changes that a lot of people disagreed with (Segwit). The takeover was already complete by that point. They could not destroy Bitcoin so they made it useless for its intended purpose and made sure it could never scale to support the whole world. Segwit was necessary to support the Lightning Network, which is just a secondary banking layer that acts as a parasite to the miners (LN fees go to node operators, not miners). If not for the fork, Bitcoin would have been permanently altered with no way to undo the changes later. At first they promised to increase the block size as well, but afterward reneged on that promise. That was the point which Roger lost faith and began supporting Bitcoin Cash.
Just want to point out that Proof of Work is not the same as "created out of thin air". All bitcoins were produced from consuming energy. There is an actual cost (in electricity) to mine and produce new BTC.
Some other cryptos did away with Proof of Work because they said it's wasteful. Okay. But the alternative is trusting a central authority to manage the ledger honestly, or trusting an elite class who already owns most of the supply to be benevolent, and we know how that goes.
It works for as long as the authority maintains the power to be a credible threat. And even when that breaks down there very quickly arises another authority.
No, it isn't.because it is not made of, or backed by, any physical commodity. Gold is hard money. Prior to some time in 1968 US Silver Certificates were also hard money, because the paper certificate could be redeemed for silver.
It's the hardest money on the planet. It can't be diluted or over produced. It takes work to produce it. Look at the amount of energy, info and time it takes to mine it. It's a store of value.
What makes gold a store of value? It's bc we agree it has value. Think about it.
You used a very specific term initially which was hard money. Bitcoin is not hard money because it isn't made of a physical commodity and there is no physical commodity backing it. It is digital and has zero intrinsic value because it's just bits that make up a digital ledger.
The US dollar is also a store of value and billions of people agree it has value, but it isn't really hard money, unless we're talking metal coins because those are actually made out of commodities.
There are some cryptocurrencies that are backed by gold. These would be hard money.
Grain has intrinsic nutritive value based on it's physical nature. It doesn't matter if nobody alive considers it worth anything, it still has innate nutritive value.
By the definition I'm using hard money is anything that is hard to produce, can't be diluted, backed by a commodity (energy it takes to produce) and is a store of wealth. In those terms BTC is the hardest money at this time.
Anything can by definition be agreed upon as a store of value. As with a fiat dollar or metal from the ground or digital bits of info. If enough people agree that bits of info which has certain properties as a store of value then it is valuable by definition.
That's a bit like saying you're a good person, but nothing your version of good allows indiscriminate murder. You've added conditions to the term that aren't normally there.
My problem with calling Bitcoin a hard currency is that it has zero intrinsic value, it isn't immutable, and you cannot physically posses it. Why this matters and how it differs from hard money.
No intrinsic value. What is the intrinsic value of bits in a digital blockchain ledger? Nothing, because it only has the valve that other people place on it because you can't do anything with it except move those bits around to put it in different wallets.
Contrast that to commodity based hard money like grain or copper. These have intrinsic value, meaning even if the whole rest of the World decides it is worthless, it still has intrinsic value because I can eat my grain or forge my copper into tools. Your Bitcoin is truly useless without other people valuing it, and that is a problem because:
It's not immutable. Meaning, it can be changed. Bitcoin is really just bits in a digital blockchain. Software manages that blockchain. Software can be changed. The 21 million Bitcoin rule can be changed. If I have a gold coin, all the other owners of gold coins can't decide they're going to change anything about my gold coin. If every Bitcoin node operator decided to run different code that removed the 21 Bitcoin limit or removed your wallet, you'd be screwed because your Bitcoin has no intrinsic value and because other people hold power over it.
You can't physically posses it. That means you are effectively incapable of actually doing anything with it without other entities, which you do not control, being involved.
Yeah, and I’m sure that passed but this isn’t a regular tax case. He renounced his citizenship and the gmen are now saying he lied. With fraud I’m not sure of the time limit.
My understanding is that Blockchain in crypto stores each transaction in the blockchain as the crypto is transferred in ownership (holdership?). Anyway, if they cracked the encryption it may be possible for the IRS to have associated back to this person transactions occurring in 2014 or earlier.
Also, I do not believe (again going on memory) that crypto like BTC was classified as anything back then from the government / IRS perspective. That being the case, the classification in recent years has been retroactively applied and the law or regulation that didn't exist then is now applied back to that time.
I do believe that would run afoul of any legitimate court system, but the IRS gets to try their cases in a special court and legitimacy and actually following the law isn't really a concern there in my opinion.
Bitcoin was classified as an asset Jan 1 of 2014, the IRS started treating it as commodities under the U.S. Commodity Exchange Act.
I know because I temporarily moved to Ireland in 2014 for business and the IRS sent me a letter saying that they were going to tally up my personal property and make me pay taxes on it like I sold everything. I had to send them proof that I was retaining my citizenship.
They sent me line items of my major property holdings and assets. One of them was a line item for my bitcoin I'd bought on a whim a while before when it cost almost nothing.
They wanted to tax me the value in 2014 for the 250 bitcoin I owned. They valued it at around $80-90k and wanted me to pay 30% on that in tax.
No, but I asked that question very early in the process and they said they could provide that information, but since I didn't give up citizenship I didn't have to go down that route.
That's not how that works. BTC is perfectly traceable and the transactions in question were done at exchanges that already had his ID. This is about him operating his businesses using BTC for years and then when he left the US he sold them for USD and moved it to a foreign bank account. That's what they say he didn't pay tax on because he didn't declare his BTC holdings.
That's not what this is, this is an expatriation tax. In general when you expatriate all your property is deemed sold for its fair market value on the day before your expatriation date, which means any gains you would have realized are considered income and thus you owe taxes on them.
Meaning, you can't open a brokerage account, buy and hold stock in it for 40 years while you work here, then renounce your citizenship and move to Panama and take your $2 million account without paying taxes on the gains.
Ouch.
So let's say you do pay the. IRS expat financial hostage tax, they consider everything you owned as sold and taxable at the moment of expatriation, but in reality you kept you retirement find money in the same account and you kept your real property (home /land). By paying fill taxes on those assets now to IRS are you free and clear on those assets?
So let's say 5-10 years later you finally liquidate those assets and they appreciated in value by some amount. What does the IRS do then?
You only pay on your gains based on what they are valued at the day prior to your expatriation date. What happens to them afterward is not the concern of the IRS (barring any activities you may have undertaken since expatriation that may once again subject you to US tax law, so don't go getting a green card and moving back)
This is one of the classic myths people all for. Once your wallet is associated with anything - including Tax records, KYC etc, every transaction on that wallet can be tracked.
IRS is using AI this year and so they can go over anyone's taxes easily. I took 3 courses in ChatGPT and I could see the AI when I did my taxes this year (it also made it easier to do your taxes). I am sure they did a dig on Bitcoiners.
The central banks already do control BTC. Is it a coincidence that Roger Ver, the guy who was arrested, also just released a book exposing how they infiltrated and corrupted Bitcoin from the inside?
Very interesting. The Roger Ver guy doesn't sound like a random target.
For sure, but I would say the timing is not random either. There is a lot of punches and counter-punches being thrown in the Financial theatre of this war, and I think this has to do with the DS attempts to take control of BTC.
They already took over BTC a long time ago. Roger was on the forefront as he saw it happening and tried to stop it. He just released a book about it - Hijacking Bitcoin.
Over the target!
During Segwit fork?
The fork was the result of the Core developers refusing to increase the block size and insisting on implementing changes that a lot of people disagreed with (Segwit). The takeover was already complete by that point. They could not destroy Bitcoin so they made it useless for its intended purpose and made sure it could never scale to support the whole world. Segwit was necessary to support the Lightning Network, which is just a secondary banking layer that acts as a parasite to the miners (LN fees go to node operators, not miners). If not for the fork, Bitcoin would have been permanently altered with no way to undo the changes later. At first they promised to increase the block size as well, but afterward reneged on that promise. That was the point which Roger lost faith and began supporting Bitcoin Cash.
Thanks for this summary.
Bitcoin BAD, Federal Reserve fake money GOOD, both created out of thin air, WTF
There are limited supply of Bitcoins. The limited supply fulfills the Supply/Demand of economics.
The Fed Reserve prints money, to pay off loans. If I attempt to do the same thing, I go to jail.
"both created out of thin air"
it's unfortunate that people don't understand what money is or can be. real money is not 'declared' (US Constitution), it is 'agreed upon'.
Just want to point out that Proof of Work is not the same as "created out of thin air". All bitcoins were produced from consuming energy. There is an actual cost (in electricity) to mine and produce new BTC.
Some other cryptos did away with Proof of Work because they said it's wasteful. Okay. But the alternative is trusting a central authority to manage the ledger honestly, or trusting an elite class who already owns most of the supply to be benevolent, and we know how that goes.
Declaration by armed authority is a good way to get a lot of people to agree upon something.
That only works for so long.
It works for as long as the authority maintains the power to be a credible threat. And even when that breaks down there very quickly arises another authority.
Bitcoin is hard money, it is not produced out of thin air.
No, it isn't.because it is not made of, or backed by, any physical commodity. Gold is hard money. Prior to some time in 1968 US Silver Certificates were also hard money, because the paper certificate could be redeemed for silver.
It's the hardest money on the planet. It can't be diluted or over produced. It takes work to produce it. Look at the amount of energy, info and time it takes to mine it. It's a store of value.
What makes gold a store of value? It's bc we agree it has value. Think about it.
You used a very specific term initially which was hard money. Bitcoin is not hard money because it isn't made of a physical commodity and there is no physical commodity backing it. It is digital and has zero intrinsic value because it's just bits that make up a digital ledger.
The US dollar is also a store of value and billions of people agree it has value, but it isn't really hard money, unless we're talking metal coins because those are actually made out of commodities.
There are some cryptocurrencies that are backed by gold. These would be hard money.
Intrinsic value does not exist. Only subjective value does.
Grain has intrinsic nutritive value based on it's physical nature. It doesn't matter if nobody alive considers it worth anything, it still has innate nutritive value.
By the definition I'm using hard money is anything that is hard to produce, can't be diluted, backed by a commodity (energy it takes to produce) and is a store of wealth. In those terms BTC is the hardest money at this time.
Anything can by definition be agreed upon as a store of value. As with a fiat dollar or metal from the ground or digital bits of info. If enough people agree that bits of info which has certain properties as a store of value then it is valuable by definition.
That's a bit like saying you're a good person, but nothing your version of good allows indiscriminate murder. You've added conditions to the term that aren't normally there.
My problem with calling Bitcoin a hard currency is that it has zero intrinsic value, it isn't immutable, and you cannot physically posses it. Why this matters and how it differs from hard money.
Contrast that to commodity based hard money like grain or copper. These have intrinsic value, meaning even if the whole rest of the World decides it is worthless, it still has intrinsic value because I can eat my grain or forge my copper into tools. Your Bitcoin is truly useless without other people valuing it, and that is a problem because:
It's not immutable. Meaning, it can be changed. Bitcoin is really just bits in a digital blockchain. Software manages that blockchain. Software can be changed. The 21 million Bitcoin rule can be changed. If I have a gold coin, all the other owners of gold coins can't decide they're going to change anything about my gold coin. If every Bitcoin node operator decided to run different code that removed the 21 Bitcoin limit or removed your wallet, you'd be screwed because your Bitcoin has no intrinsic value and because other people hold power over it.
You can't physically posses it. That means you are effectively incapable of actually doing anything with it without other entities, which you do not control, being involved.
At this point the Division of Jerkoffs has lost so much credibility, anybody they're pursuing I assume is a good guy.
Is there a statute of limitations on tax records?
Yeah, and I’m sure that passed but this isn’t a regular tax case. He renounced his citizenship and the gmen are now saying he lied. With fraud I’m not sure of the time limit.
No statute of limitations on fraud.
Should we tell that to Dr Fauci?
No statute of limitations on fraud, and they are claiming fraud.
It's 10 years for this kind of case and they waited til the last possible minute.
He is over the target with his newly released book.
death and taxes, right? My bet is a hard no. The pig is never fed.
There's a new meme in there somewhere, the pigs... fed...
My understanding is that Blockchain in crypto stores each transaction in the blockchain as the crypto is transferred in ownership (holdership?). Anyway, if they cracked the encryption it may be possible for the IRS to have associated back to this person transactions occurring in 2014 or earlier.
Also, I do not believe (again going on memory) that crypto like BTC was classified as anything back then from the government / IRS perspective. That being the case, the classification in recent years has been retroactively applied and the law or regulation that didn't exist then is now applied back to that time.
I do believe that would run afoul of any legitimate court system, but the IRS gets to try their cases in a special court and legitimacy and actually following the law isn't really a concern there in my opinion.
Bitcoin was classified as an asset Jan 1 of 2014, the IRS started treating it as commodities under the U.S. Commodity Exchange Act.
I know because I temporarily moved to Ireland in 2014 for business and the IRS sent me a letter saying that they were going to tally up my personal property and make me pay taxes on it like I sold everything. I had to send them proof that I was retaining my citizenship.
They sent me line items of my major property holdings and assets. One of them was a line item for my bitcoin I'd bought on a whim a while before when it cost almost nothing.
They wanted to tax me the value in 2014 for the 250 bitcoin I owned. They valued it at around $80-90k and wanted me to pay 30% on that in tax.
Understanding that you proved citizenship and didn't have to fight every line item, but did they ever provide backup for their valuation?
No, but I asked that question very early in the process and they said they could provide that information, but since I didn't give up citizenship I didn't have to go down that route.
Thanks for clarifying.
Glad you didn't end up having to pay the taxes on everything they claimed you owed.
That's not how that works. BTC is perfectly traceable and the transactions in question were done at exchanges that already had his ID. This is about him operating his businesses using BTC for years and then when he left the US he sold them for USD and moved it to a foreign bank account. That's what they say he didn't pay tax on because he didn't declare his BTC holdings.
AI be God Hammer for the Thor's
That's not what this is, this is an expatriation tax. In general when you expatriate all your property is deemed sold for its fair market value on the day before your expatriation date, which means any gains you would have realized are considered income and thus you owe taxes on them.
Meaning, you can't open a brokerage account, buy and hold stock in it for 40 years while you work here, then renounce your citizenship and move to Panama and take your $2 million account without paying taxes on the gains.
https://www.irs.gov/individuals/international-taxpayers/expatriation-tax
Ouch. So let's say you do pay the. IRS expat financial hostage tax, they consider everything you owned as sold and taxable at the moment of expatriation, but in reality you kept you retirement find money in the same account and you kept your real property (home /land). By paying fill taxes on those assets now to IRS are you free and clear on those assets?
So let's say 5-10 years later you finally liquidate those assets and they appreciated in value by some amount. What does the IRS do then?
You only pay on your gains based on what they are valued at the day prior to your expatriation date. What happens to them afterward is not the concern of the IRS (barring any activities you may have undertaken since expatriation that may once again subject you to US tax law, so don't go getting a green card and moving back)
Come on man! Pay the tax bastards! They need every dime they can get to send to Ukraine and Israhell!
This is just another reason why it is better to invest in precious metals to protect your own financial assets against inflation.
No, it's another reason to abolish the IRS.
You can't check out and you can never leave. Get bent tyrants.
Runaway Slave and CRACKER be mad.
I know nothing about bitcoin and noting about this man, but this case is soooo wrong. How deep state is spain?
I thought Bitcoin holdings were supposed to be entirely confidential?
This is one of the classic myths people all for. Once your wallet is associated with anything - including Tax records, KYC etc, every transaction on that wallet can be tracked.
IRS is using AI this year and so they can go over anyone's taxes easily. I took 3 courses in ChatGPT and I could see the AI when I did my taxes this year (it also made it easier to do your taxes). I am sure they did a dig on Bitcoiners.
How do you under-report computer blips on a screen and a digital collection of certificates and numbers... which other people have assigned $$ value?
It's one thing to under-report currency or income.
It's another thing to under-report computer blips.
It does not matter whether something makes sense. This is probably enough for whatever leverage they hope to to gain right now.
Bitcoin BAD, Federal Reserve fake money GOOD, both created out of thin air, WTF
The central banks already do control BTC. Is it a coincidence that Roger Ver, the guy who was arrested, also just released a book exposing how they infiltrated and corrupted Bitcoin from the inside?