[fpgaminer]

While generally I tend to favor less government involvement, especially when it comes to privacy, I find myself on the other side of the fence here.

Ignoring the arguments about what Coinbases is _legally_ required to hand over, it seems like Coinbase withholding this information from the IRS really only favors criminals. If you're a law abiding citizen you're already giving all this information to the IRS yourself. Every Coin-fiat transaction is taxed and must be reported. So there's not much difference for you. It's only if you aren't following the laws that this has an impact on you. So I find myself in _favor_ of the IRS snooping around in Coinbase's business. More compliance means less average taxes.

That said, there are nuances. What information exactly gets provided to the IRS is important. Exchange/transaction events? Sure. Money in/out? Ehhh, maybe not. Bitcoin address data? Definitely not.

(To be perfectly clear, this is _not_ an instance of "if you have nothing to hide". This is an instance where we're _already_ giving this data to the government, and that's _necessary_ because of our tax laws. There is no equivalence to other privacy cases.)