Coinbase Ordered to Turn Over Identities of 14,355 Crypto Traders to the IRS
The naivitee, ignorance, and arrogance of this thread astounds me.<p>The HN population (I include myself in this) seems to think everything is new, there are no precedents for any of this, and that we&#x27;re building some kind of new society here. We aren&#x27;t. Times like this make me wish people like us were less dismissive of history, liberal arts, and people-not-in-tech generally.<p>Case 1: a commenter below said something about &quot;a guy moved his assets into BTC to hide from bankruptcy&quot;. Bankruptcy courts deal with this stuff ALL DAY. It&#x27;s their job. You can&#x27;t just make huge transfers&#x2F;sales when in bankruptcy and expect people to think that&#x27;s normal behavior. This has gone on long before bitcoin, and will continue long after it&#x27;s gone.<p>Case 2: taxes. BTC is an asset. If you buy at price X and sell at price Y, guess what, you owe taxes on Y-X. I don&#x27;t understand how this is news to anyone.<p>Case 3: money laundering and other types of financial crimes. There are entire companies who build software to detect money laundering. It&#x27;s a well-understood problem.<p>All I&#x27;m trying to say is, just because you have a CS degree and work in San Francisco, don&#x27;t think you&#x27;re the smartest person in the world. Moving money is one of the oldest human endeavors and unlike a lot of topics in software development, it&#x27;s an old profession with a huge body of accumulated domain knowledge. We shouldn&#x27;t be so quick to dismiss it.