Sending money back home is a far different scenario than laundering, and the assertion that it is assumes bad faith from the beginning.
I'm not suggesting you don't have a point, but the idea that BTC has value is, I think, arbitrary at this point. There are thousands of leaves littering the lawn in my back yard right now -- surely I could send those to a foreign land without having to declare it, right?
An argument could be made that they have more actual value than a crypto-currency at this point, as they're a tangible good.
Similarly, if I send $10,000 worth of virtual roses to friends on Facebook, the government is not interested, and I haven't seen anything that convinces me, at the moment, that BTC should be treated differently than any other all-digital good.
> Sending money back home is a far different scenario than laundering, and the assertion that it is assumes bad faith from the beginning.
The government can and will assume bad faith in any transfer involving large amounts of money and/or items of value.
> Similarly, if I send $10,000 worth of virtual roses to friends on Facebook, the government is not interested, and I haven't seen anything that convinces me, at the moment, that BTC should be treated differently than any other all-digital good.
Actually, I believe Facebook would be required to report that transfer to the IRS.
> Actually, I believe Facebook would be required to report that transfer to the IRS.
I believe you're right, because there's a cash transaction there, and cash has intrinsic value.
But if I 'bought' LTC with BTC that I mined at a cost of idle CPU cycles, where's the intrinsic value? The market rate for CPU cycles is far less than the value of the equivalent BTC (or, at least was initially).
If I'm holding $1 million dollars in a bank, I would be subject to capital gains taxes on its interest earnings. If I'm holding 1 million BTC on my hard drive, I'm not. If I paid for those BTC, that's a bit different than if I mined them early.
I'm not trying to be difficult, so much as point out that there's still a long way to go before you can actually say that BTC is currency, and that even if we do determine that it is currency, that it's subject to the same rules and regulations as actual currency or commodities. If I paid capital gains taxes on BTC holdings yesterday, vs waiting til today, I'd have 'saved' approximately 15% due to market fluctuation.
As there's no real 'anchor' to the value of BTC at the moment, I think there are just more questions than answers, really.
I'm not suggesting you don't have a point, but the idea that BTC has value is, I think, arbitrary at this point. There are thousands of leaves littering the lawn in my back yard right now -- surely I could send those to a foreign land without having to declare it, right?
An argument could be made that they have more actual value than a crypto-currency at this point, as they're a tangible good.
Similarly, if I send $10,000 worth of virtual roses to friends on Facebook, the government is not interested, and I haven't seen anything that convinces me, at the moment, that BTC should be treated differently than any other all-digital good.