IRS issues additional guidance on tax treatment for cryptocurrency
So if you get a new coin from a hard fork, you owe taxes on the fair market value of that new coin you get. This seems pretty dangerous - if the fair market value is high on the first day of trading, but declines a lot, you could get taxed on value that you never realized.<p>It seems like this will incentivize people to sell off new tokens immediately, in order to pay the taxes they incurred during the fork.<p>To me it seems very unintuitive to tax a hard fork. It is like taxing a stock split. Your asset hasn&#x27;t really changed, it is just now represented in a different way.<p>Another weird thing about these taxes is that they assume that one of the forks is the &quot;real asset&quot; and the other fork is the &quot;new asset&quot;. In practice, it seems like a lot of times a fork happens along with a lot of argument about which side of the fork is the &quot;real&quot; one.<p>Well, I guess the IRS does not see cryptocurrency the same way as my intuition would.