Insights

In 2016, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (“TIGTA”) recommended that the IRS “revise third-party information reporting documents to identify the amounts of virtual currency used in taxable transactions,” as a partial solution to TIGTA’s concern that too much virtual currency activity goes unreported…
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Ok, I admit it.  This blog post began purely out of selfishness. I read about the Government’s seizure early this month of $1 billion worth of bitcoin, which the Government justified on the grounds that the bitcoin bore a relationship to a now-shut-down website called…
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Ever since virtual currencies such as Bitcoin appeared on the scene, a multitude of questions has followed in their wake concerning the tax treatment of these new types of assets.  Over the past decade, the IRS has been slow to issue guidance to taxpayers on…
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Last week members of Capes Sokol’s Business and Real Estate Practice Group attended a CLE webinar co-sponsored by the American Bar Association Real Property, Trust and Estate Law Section and the American College of Real Estate Lawyers. The webinar entitled, “Blockchain and Real Estate –…
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About two weeks ago, the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants – “the world’s largest member association representing the accounting profession,” – sent a letter to the Internal Revenue Service, along with a document entitled “Request for Guidance Regarding Virtual Currency”. As discussed below, in…
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  On this day in 2010, the first reported purchase of a consumer product using Bitcoin took place.  Organized on Bitcointalk forum, Laszlo Hanyecz, a programmer from Florida, traded a British man 10,000 bitcoins for two Papa John’s pizzas. The market value of the Papa…
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  A common misconception about digital assets is that they exist in a lawless virtual Wild West. While there are not any federal regulations specifically drafted for digital assets, our existing laws were intended to be broad enough to encompass new financial instruments, and a…
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