They do it for stock, and almost no stockholder has physical shares. Shares can be fractional. My Sharebuilder account had three decimal places.

You're really over-analyzing the definition of property. If it can be bought and sold it's property. If it can be traded you are legally required to report every time you trade, and whether that trade resulted in a tax loss for you or a gain. Let me put it to you another way:

If there was any way to hack the definition of property so that something that could be sold for lots of money was not property, would Mitt Romney pay taxes?

And how do you intend to sell your BTC without an exchange? Or rather, who do you intend to sell you Bitcoin to?

Some guy you find on a website crawling with IRS agents?

On some new Mt. Gox based in Russia?

There's a reason almost all gold transactions get taxed even tho gold works a lot better as a currency then BTC.

I changed that like three times in my most, bnut eventually I realized it doesn't matter whether they are popular in an objective sense of the word.

As far as the IRS IS concerned they're popular now because lots of Americans claim to be millionaires based on Bitcoin, and some of those Americans like to shout from the mountaintop that it's untaxable. If those idiots would shut the fuck up they might actually get away with paying no taxes on their bitcoin. Since they don't the IRS is gonna have to actually send a few of them to prison so most Americans realize they're wrong.

Which means they need to enforce capital gains taxes on BTC, which in turn means they will probably actually bother to figure out whose selling BTC.

Just because you out-perform your co-workers doesn't mean you didn't get the job (and thus the salary) by lying. The act of fraud isn't your job performance, it's your application. Moreover the victim isn't necessarily your boss, it's the qualified applicant who didn't get the job due to the fake resume.

You got money due to a fake document. That caused hard to both the employer (which spent money on you), and other applicants (who didn;t get the job. That is the definition of Fraud. Depending on how good the job is, the premium for college degrees in your field, etc. it may not rise to the level of Criminal Fraud. And you are not likely to go to prison even if it does because nobody prosecutes that shit.

But that doesn't mean you would actually get off if the government tried to send you to prison.

There's no non-messy way to do this.

Either all your transactions get taxed (the way they picked), or you always pay the high personal income tax rate.

If virtual currencies stay popular it's highly likely that Congress will write some new rules that make more sense, but also force virtual currencies more into the normal, highly regulated, fairly transparent (especially to cops) financial system.

There's specific rules governing this with stocks. First-In-First-Out would mean your appreciation (and gain/loss) is based on the oldest coin still in your wallet. Last-In-Last-Out does the opposite, and all the numbers are based on the coin you purchased most recently. You could also figure the average cost of the coins in your wallet and use that as your basis. You get to pick which method you use.

It looks like you could switch from LIFO to FIFO and back from year to year. The sole restriction seems to be that you can only use each coin once.

The problem is how the US Government, and especially Congress, works.

The US government has a lot more power-brokers then pretty much any other government. That means that a) when power-broker #97 has a reasonable-sounding idea that only adds one little wrinkle to tax law he can get it through and b) no one power-broker can say "fuck this, let's iron out the wrinkles" and actually have it happen.

If this was Canada and Speaker Boehner could fire half his caucus simply be refusing to sign their renomination papers, or there was a Finance Minister who could re-write the tax code on the fly we'd probably have a much simpler tax code.

"Not in business" could make it easier. A bankrupt entity isn't able to hire a lawyer to stop the IRS from going through it's paperwork.

Moreover the IRS doesn't actually need records. What it needs is proof you got money and you didn't put it on your tax forms. If they get your bank records they'll know exactly how much money you made when you sold Bitcoins from when you deposited it. They will tax your ass on that full amount. Plus penalties, and interest. Any attempts to talk them down will result in extremely polite,. professional, "fuck yous," and attempts to dodge by ignoring the bill will be met with increased penalties and wage garnishments.

If you'd declared the Bitcoins and deducted your costs (in tax terms "reported the basis") then you'd have saved money, on the original tax bill, paid no penalties and interest, and never been told "fuck you" by the IRS.

So basically if the IRS really wants to screw early Bitcoiners they will be screwed. It'll be more work then screwing people who dodge their tax bills with questionable home office deductions, but that just means the IRS will really enjoy screwing BTCers.

You can still do that legally. But if you don't report it on your tax forms, and it counts as a capital gain, and they catch you you're gonna be in trouble.

Whether they'll be able to catch you is the tricky question. With most capital-gains they do it because there's a paper trail. Local property tax authorities know when you bought your house, how much you paid, etc. Federally-regulated banks report stock-sales. If Bitcoin doesn't stay popular they may not bother developing ways to track your ass down and nail it to the wall. You'll almost certainly get away with it unless you use your untaxed Bitcoin wealth to turn your life into a rap video or something.

If Bitcoin does stop popular the top exchanges will all be forced to report sales to the IRS and other tax authorities. International tax agencies just skooshed Swiss bank privacy rules like they were a bug, a bunch of geeky hobbyists represented by the disgraced Mt. Gox don't stand a chance.

First off if you're in a state that actually spends only 8% of it's SDP you're in a minority. Most states are in 9% or 10% range. More people live in one state that's above 11% (Cali) then all sub-9% states combined.

The Feds support a lot of state-level spending through indirect programs. Student aid like Pell Grants, Race to the Top money, and support for police allows a lot of libraries to be built.

The NSA, billion-dollar-bombers, and campaign contributors only actually add up to a small fraction of the Federal budget. A huge chunk is transfer payments set up before most campaign contributors were born. Medicare and Social Security alone are a majority of Federal spending in the 2010-2019 period. Medicaid is another fairly large chunk, this year ObamaCare subsidies kick in, with Pell grants, Earned Income Credit, military retirements, the VA, etc. I'd estimate 2/3-3/4 of Federal spending is simply the Feds shuffling money from the accounts of some Americans into the accounts of American who American voters have decided deserve the money more.

The "Billion-dollar-bombers" could be gotten rid of easily in theory. In practice those pesky American voters tend to look on defense cuts as encouraging Putin to be Hitler Mk. II, so it's unlikely they'll be cut. Whatever it's other crimes, the NSA budget is a rounding error (literally: $11 Billion is under 1/3 of a percent of the total) on the Federal total. "Handouts" to campaign contributors tend to be exaggerated. There's generally no quid-pro-quo. What happens is the company that would be a shoe-in if the government decided to study the effect of dung beetle blood on the flu virus finds a candidate who supports studying dung beetle blood and sends him a check. If Congressional votes could actually be easily bought then we wouldn't have a DRIC project, we'd have a second span to the Ambassador Bridge.

Which means that when Federal spending cuts get talked about proposals tend to be both ambitious and vague (ie: every Paul Ryan "budget" ever) or specific and miniscule (like your proposal, which the NSA's 0.31% off Federal spending). The specific/miniscule cuts that could actually get passed would almost certainly include most support for states and cities because Congress doesn't get yelled at when Jindal has to expel scholarship students from Louisiana State.

Goddamn cheapskates can be obsessive. And not smart-obsessive.

If you do some actual math you'll note that any individual program is a rounding error in terms of a $Trillion budget. You'll also note clever assholes can provide plenty of rationales why even obvious spending programs suck. Remember the "volcano research" gaffe?

As for the programs you mentioned, for God's sake do some actual research. You're wrong about the C-130. It's one of the reasons that we can do the things we do, and in the context of the Air Force budget it's barely a rounding error. The "militarization" of police forces is even cheaper.

If you actually want to reduce the size of the federal government, and it's attendant tax burdens, you have to do at least two of three things.

1) Gut Social Security.

2) Gut Medicare.

3) Decide the post-Hitler decision to have a military capable of responding to m ultiple criuses at once world-wide was a dumb idea and fire half the Pentagon. Note that this doesn't involve eliminating any actual programs (our boys will still need or transport even if there are only 50k of them instead of 500k).

None of these three things ever happen because actual Americans, including you, are incapable of telling somebody who puts in 40 hours a week that the government spending he was planning on benefiting from (ie: Social Security, Medicare, or a job in the military) has to go away.

Why wouldn't lying on a resume be fraud? You're submitting a false document in hopes of getting money. That's the definition of fraud.

It's not likely to be prosecuted, or even result in a Civil Lawsuit, but that doesn't mean it's legal.

Saying something you know is untrue (ie: I have a degree) to get money (ie: a job) is fraud.

It probably won't actually be prosecuted, but that doesn't mean it could not be prosecuted.

Reading the article it didn't seem like the actual math was the problem. The problem seemed to be that the verification requirements were diverse, sundry, and obsolete.

So you might now this guy studied fish for x years with the EPA, transferred over to managing the rivers with the Corps of Engineers, moved to Interior (which manages commercial fishing regulations), did a stint in the Park Service, and then had a job evaluating NSF Grant proposals studying fish. That's five institutions you have to get paperwork from verifying precisely how long this guy worked with each one, some of that verification may be able to be emailed to you, but others may need paper forms signed.

The private sector could probably pull this off without making too many mistakes, but the private sector's definition of "too many mistakes" tends to be several orders of magnitude higher then the Federal governments. This is because people take the Federal government very seriously, and really hate it when they fuck up.

Let's say you ran a multi-billion company, and you had a program cutting prices for non-profits. Your program has rules designed to weed out the most political non-profits. The program administrator filters applications based on criteria targeting one of the main political parties. No non-profit actually has it's application denied (or loses it's price-cut) based on these criteria, but they do have to jump through a bunch of pain in the ass hoops to get approved. That's not a huge scandal. But when the IRS failed to approve applications from the Tea Party quickly enough manner Congressman started talking indictment.

In this case the risk would be that a pension applicant shades the truth a bit, and before you get official verification you start paying out, which leads to a 20/20 investigation of corrupt Federal retirees.

Keep in mind this is the Federal Government.

If they screw up the pension because that guy's six years in the Spokane-area EPA didn't count due to his having to take a demotion after using the n-word in paperwork then it's a fucking disaster. Whereas the private sector would see that extra $5-$10k a year as a rounding error, learning experience, and potential lawsuit; the Federal government sees it as a potential CNN or Congressional investigation and freaks the fuck out.

In other words the problem is not calculating the benefit given the proper data inputs. That is probably done automatically already. The problem is almost certainly getting the data that needs to be fed into the system verified. If you read the article the waste the workers mention is not that they couldn't figure out the pensions easily, it's that they couldn't start paying the pensions as long as this one asshole hadn't sent in a paper signature.

The paper signature thing makes me think that some of these pension rules haven't been amended in the past 20-30 years, which is kinda what happens when you have Checks and Balances and Congress that doesn't agree with the President.