For Bitcoin, there’s only been one constant recently: decline after decline after decline. And the superlatives have piled up really quickly.
With the Federal Reserve intending to withdraw stimulus from the market, riskier assets the world over have suffered. Bitcoin, the largest digital asset, lost as much as 8.7 per cent on Friday and dropped below $38,000 to its lowest level in six months.
Cryptocurrency meltdown erases more than $1 trillion in market value
The IRS will soon make you use facial recognition to access your taxes online The Verge. What could go wrong?
How Did ID.me Get Between You and Your Identity? Bloomberg
IRS Will Require Facial Recognition Scans to Access Your Taxes Online - Gizmodo: “Online tax filers will soon be required to submit a selfie to a third-party identity verification company using facial recognition tech in order to file their taxes or make IRS payments online. Starting this summer, users with an IRS.gov account will no longer be able to log in with a simple username and password. Instead, they will need to provide a government identification document, a selfie, and copies of their bills to Virginian-based identity verification firm ID.me to confirm their identity. That change, first noticed by Krebs on Security, marks a major shift for the IRS which previously allowed users to file their taxes without submitting personal biometric data.
In a statement to Gizmodo, an IRS spokesperson said users can still receive basic information from the IRS website without logging in, but added they would need to sign in through ID.me to make and view payments, access tax records, view or create payment plans, manage communications preference, or view tax professional authorizations. So here’s how filing taxes will work for most people later this year. Users attempting to log in to their accounts using ID.me will have to create an account with the company by uploading either a driver’s license, passport, or passport card.
Users are then told to use a cellphone camera or their computer’s webcam to take a selfie. According to ID.me’s website, the company uses a face match facial recognition system to verify the selfie matches the provided government document. If approved in ID.me’s system, users can then use these credentials to verify their identity across any of ID.me’s partners…”
In a white paper shared with Gizmodo by ID.me, the company was quick to draw a distinction between its face match system and lesser facial recognition verification systems. “Face match is equivalent to an airport agent comparing your face to the photo on your government ID card,” ID.me said. “Facial recognition is equivalent to giving your picture to the same agent, putting him on stage at a rock concert, and asking him to pick your face out of the crowd.”…
We need a better tax system for crypto
From N., an MR reader:
I own crypto in 3 different centralized exchanges, two hardware wallets, one software wallet (Metamask), have four cryptos staked in multiple different pools and I also have some cryptos I gained by mining them using my GPUs. I have made 600+ transactions between the exchanges, wallets, and staking pools. I hold 75% of my portfolio and trade the rest. So most of these transactions were for trading one coin for another from which I have profited handsomely in the 2021 bull cycle run.
But I am doing my Crypto taxes right now its an unbelievably complicated nightmare. Prior to 2020 I only held a Coinbase account and I downloaded the tax forms or the transaction list as a .csv file from it and submitted them to my tax advisor. But in 2021 I have gone deeper into crypto and I have purchased hardware wallets, held crypto in soft wallets, DeFi platforms like Aave, staked crypto, mined crypto, and traded crypto between exchanges for lower transaction fees, for coins that are available only in certain centralized and decentralized exchanges, etc etc. Many of these types of crypto transactions are taxed differently and are from different institutions.
So it’s impossible for me to do my crypto taxes easily with just a single tax form from Coinbase. I have to link all my exchanges (and expose all my crypto holdings and trades) to a crypto tax website, I have decided to use Koinly.io which charges $99 to do my taxes. I do not have any other realistic choice.
After I linked all 3 centralized exchanges where I hold crypto, the capital gains estimate Koinly.io gave seemed too large. I realized it was because it was counting the crypto I sent from centralized exchanges like Coinbase to my hardware wallets as a “Sell” so it was counting them as capital gains. I have too many transactions of this nature to manually go through them one by one and mark them as “Transfer” i.e. transfer between my own wallets. So if I want the tax software to do it automatically, I have to expose the public keys of my hardware wallets so Koinly can automatically mark them as transfers. (I haven’t done this step yet because I don’t want to expose my hardware wallet public address to anyone or anywhere and I am researching alternate ways to do this.)
But if there isn’t any other way either a) I have to spend hours going through each transaction manually and marking them as “Transfers” or b) expose the public keys of my hardware wallets to Koinly.io.
Also, there is more manual work to be done for categorizing certain transactions as moved to staking pools, marking transactions from my mining pool to exchanges as income, etc.
I know that fiat currency debit and credit card purchases are absolutely not analogous to crypto but that’s the comparison many crypto maximalists make (“take down the traditional financial and banking system!”).
Imagine if TurboTax needs your complete transaction history from your banking institutions and it goes through all credit and debit card transactions to accurately do your taxes. Would anyone accept that?
BuzzFeedNews: “For years, cryptocurrency has rivaled entire nations in terms of energy use, and US lawmakers are just now starting to investigate how crypto mining operations could be undermining global efforts to combat climate change. This question was the subject of a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee hearing on Thursday that broadly examined the carbon footprint of cryptocurrencies like bitcoin and ethereum. The panel addressed a growing refrain that certain types of crypto transactions are catastrophically energy intensive and are extending the lifetime of fossil fuel resources.
Tech Republic: “The spin animation in Microsoft PowerPoint makes shapes appear to turn, and it works great unless you’re working with a circle. You can’t see a circle spin—it spins, you just can’t see it because there’s nothing to anchor your eyes on. Adding other shapes to the circle is an easy way to expose the spin animation. In this article, we’ll add some stars to a circle so you can see the circle spin. Then, we’ll add a second layer of stars, just for fun…”
How to add a bit of spin to a circle in a PowerPoint slide Tech Republic