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Submission + - UK tax authority clarifies Bitcoin policy - VAT exempt for mining and exchange (cio.co.uk)

Qedward writes: Exchanging or mining Bitcoins is exempt from value-added tax (VAT) in the UK, but accepting the virtual currency for goods and services is subject to it, HMRC said yesterday.

The guidance should give those handling bitcoins a bit more confidence about tax questions, as authorities around the world mull how the five-year-old virtual currency should be regulated.

HM Revenue & Customs described in a brief how it views Bitcoin in light of four taxes: VAT, corporation tax, income tax and capital gains tax.

While Bitcoin miners and those exchanging it for British pounds or foreign currency are exempt from VAT, people selling goods in exchange for virtual currencies are required to collect it. VAT is charged for most goods and services in at a rate of 20%.

When goods are sold for bitcoins, the amount of VAT to be paid will be calculated based on "the sterling value of the cryptocurrency at the point when the transaction takes place."

The guidance is murky on whether other activities involving Bitcoin are subject to corporation tax, income tax or capital gains tax. Like any other activity, the agency said, it "depends on the activities and the parties involved," and each case will be considered on its own.

Comment Re:You already have Blender 3D... (Score 1) 79

If you open blender on a fresh install you see a 3d view of a cube, and nothing that looks much like a time line. I tried dragging a video file into various bits of the interface and nothing happened. A bit of hunting finds me a 'video sequence editor', that sounds right, but when I drop a clip on it says "Error: file '/foo/bar.mp4' could not be loaded". Useful. Ok, so lets assume that it actually meant 'I don't have a codec for MP4', so i'll try a webm. now I have a block with the name of my file on the time line. But there is no viewer in site. If I press play then a green bar moves across the time line, but I see nothing.

Now I know that if I sat down and read the docs I could make a whole film using blender. But it is not the user friendly video editor that pitiiv is aiming to be.

Comment Re:You already have Blender 3D... (Score 3, Insightful) 79

I think pitivi is aiming to be usable for a different set of users than blender. Pitivi lets you just drag video clips into time line without worrying about resolutions, frame rates or codecs. Achieving the same process in blender requires quite a bit more work.

Vim and emacs are great tools, but it does not mean that we don't need gedit and kate.

Comment Re:Pitivi is such a POS (Score 5, Informative) 79

While Cinelerra is very capable, it also seems to be an unmaintainable code dump. The community project can just about get it in a state that it builds, but I am not aware that they have added any features to it. IIRC the community devs though it would be better to start again from scatch, with a project called something like Luminara, but I can't find much about that now.

On the other hand Pitivi is build on a solid base of libraries that are used widely in other peices of software. Even if pitivi were not to succede then it would have created the tools for other people to build an editor. It also provides a base of libraries for experimental editors like Nova cut.

Comment Re:We need nuclear. (Score 2) 551

> Nucelar power has problems and if we were to use it as much as we use fossil fuels, it would cause the same problem.

Nuclear's problems are vastly exaggerated. There are industrial accidents and oil and gas explosions every week that have more fatalities than the Fukushima disaster. Passive safety features in modern designs make them safer still, and that's before fancy designs like subcritical reactors. There are methods of destroying nuclear waste (transmutation) or using it as fuel. People worry about long half lives of isotopes, but that ignores that pollutants like lead or mercury effectively have infinite half lives.

Nuclear certainly scares people, but that does not mean that it is dangerous (relative to any other method of power generation, or any other industrial process).

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