| Here is a counter point I would argue. Anyone can make a Bitcoin fork, in fact Bitcoin forks are being made every week now. Is every Bitcoin holder now liable for that? Also these forks often collapse, so when was the income gain? The same day? You'd have people owing more tax than their entire net worth. (Forks often pump in the first day/week then drop to nothing.) If this is possible then you could attack every Bitcoin holder by making millions of forks each day and making lots of trades to give each fork real value. If you don't declare each fork you end up getting penalties. I would imagine a more sane way to deal with this is like how the ATO deals with Bitcoin mining. You mine Bitcoin but it's not realized until transferred to a third party. I would argue the same for forks. A fork is made, you have coins. But it's not like you received those coins. Technically you always had them as they are old coins just now on a different chain. If you sell the coins then it's a gain that you owe tax on. But forcing each user to track every fork as income is impractical and not viable. You'll see more of this as thousands of forks come into existence over the coming years. This is something I would actually look into getting a private ruling about. |