[modeless]

Finally! Guidance on airdrops and forks was sorely needed.

The guidance seems mostly in line with expectations, but I find one bit confusing. The IRS is drawing a distinction between a hard fork with an airdrop and a hard fork without an airdrop. I don't understand the concept of a hard fork without an airdrop. If the new chain doesn't at least maintain the balances of all existing accounts using the new chain's token, then IMO it's not a fork at all but simply the launch of a new cryptocurrency. Can someone give an example of the kind of hard fork with no airdrop the IRS is talking about?

[nullc]

> The guidance seems mostly in line with expectations,

I'm curious what expectation you feel it met?

I believe it somehow managed to provide absolutely no clarity on any of the difficult questions. And to the extent that one can attempt to apply it literally and conservatively the results are unconscionable (e.g. having to pay income tax many times over on any hardfork-prone cryptocurrency).

The only way that I can see that this met expectations is that those of us that don't own hardfork prone centrally administered assets and diligently sold fork coins ASAP and recording ordinary income for their sale won't be impacted significantly by this. But anyone who didn't do those things is now in a world of confusion.

[modeless]

I expected that airdrops would be ordinary income based on the market value at airdrop time. I expected that stock split rules would not apply to forks (though this may seem obvious, there were many that were arguing the opposite). I was hoping that tokens you can't access due to exchanges not supporting them or whatever don't count as income. Those are all aligned with my expectations.

I agree that the rules are stupid and have bad outcomes in many cases. But I didn't expect IRS guidance to change that. I also agree that the guidance is ambiguous on hard forks (is it an "airdrop" or not?) and that's a big problem.

[nullc]

Except in the situation where the HF coin gets the original ticker or the very rare situation that there is a liquid futures market in advance of the fork (has only arguably happened once that I'm aware of) there is no market value at the time of the fork-- the fork happens at an instant, and the asset cannot be traded at or before that instant.

A market value might well be established in the hours or days after, but it isn't always.

In cases where the newly created cryptocurrency immediately carries the market there is an unambiguous value for the new system (and the original cryptocurrencies value becomes ambiguous), but applying income tax to the new asset there leads to absurd results.

I agree that the ruling seems to generally support some aspects of one of the most obvious conclusions in the simplest of cases, but it fails to meaningfully clarify the application... and also suggests some absurdities that almost no one was expecting.

[modeless]

I hadn't considered the situation where the forked coin is the one that retains most of the value. I think in that situation I would be comfortable arguing to the IRS that the old currency is actually the fork, e.g. ETC vs ETH. The technical and legal definitions of "fork" don't necessarily have to match.

I would also be comfortable using the first trading day's close as the market value rather than the instantaneous value at fork time which as you say doesn't exist in most cases. Of course the "close" time is arbitrary but as long as you have a consistent methodology for choosing it you should probably be OK.

In any case, it's clear the IRS didn't think hard enough about the consequences of their guidance here. I hope they clarify more but we are probably in for another long wait. Ideally, Congress would do something to make the rules more reasonable.

[nullc]

> I hadn't considered the situation where the forked coin is the one that retains most of the value. I think in that situation I would be comfortable arguing to the IRS that the old currency is actually the fork, e.g. ETC vs ETH. The technical and legal definitions of "fork" don't necessarily have to match.

Agreed, but that appears to contradict the plain text of the ruling.

It's also not guaranteed to be unambiguous. Even with ETH/ETC and BTC vs BCH/BSV there are people that argue the forks are the real thing, though I agree that they're crazy. But it isn't hard to imagine a situation where the split were closer to 50/50 (and maybe both sides got different tickers).

It's also possible for it to look like one won but have the situation reverse... E.g. it's not completely implausible that ETH might have won originally, but then a week in the political winds changed, all the hash power moved to ETC leaving ETH useless and then had the ethereum foundation people say the fork was a mistake, and then everyone followed along with giving the old chain back the ticker.

When BSV split off, there were two chains each incompatible with each other and the original rules didn't continue (in that case). Many exchanges listed two assets, transferring any bcash holdings into each equally, "Bitcoin ABC" and "Bitcoin SV". Other exchanges gave ABC the BCH ticket. I think at least one gave BSV the BCH ticker. Over time the ABC side got the BCH ticker everywhere. I imagine if BSV had succeeded in their effort to get more hash power the situation would still be highly inconsistent.

In some cases cryptocurrencies have made additional consensus rule changes to make sure hardforks couldn't be undone, in some cases they haven't. Their understanding of hardforks seems to assume that all hardforks are bilateral, but in many cases they're actually one sided and could be undone.

I agree that your interpretation should be the one adopted when it is unambiguous.

> I would also be comfortable using the first trading day's close as the market value

I would agree if we were talking about orderly or regulated markets. For example, in many bitcoin forks the fork was not meaningfully tradable for a week or more-- and when it became tradable it was only tradable on obscure foreign exchanges whos terms and conditions forbid US residents from using the service. In these illiquid markets the prices have been rather distorted.

FWIW, the interpretation I adopted was that I've just sold fork quickly as soon as I could reasonably move them to a place to sell them, then reconized as income the value I actually received in selling them. ... at least the forks I knew about, but there have likely been other forks that I've never heard of.

There are also likely coins that I could be argued to technically control but which I don't currently know about-- stuff like coins mined in 2012 which are currently lost in corrupted wallet files (or perhaps with forgotten passwords that I'll eventually crack) on old system images that I'll probably find some day, but which I don't know about right now, even after doing a bit of looking.

Consider: for people actually using Bitcoin rather than speculating in an exchange account-- their bitcoin holdings can look a lot more like USD laying around your house than like your S&P 500 ETF in your brokerage account.

Because of these lost cases I think it would be much more reasonable to state that ordinary income is only realized when you demonstrate actual control over the coins, e.g. by moving them. This would have the effect of allowing people to delay the income tax, but they'd do so only with serious risk of value loss and at the cost of delaying the starting date for a capital gains calculation (so it would fail an equivalents test). This would nicely eliminate a lot of the absurd corner cases, including stuff like the winner flip/flop.

[modeless]

> FWIW, the interpretation I adopted was that I've just sold fork quickly as soon as I could reasonably move them to a place to sell them, then reconized as income the value I actually received in selling them. ... at least the forks I knew about, but there have likely been other forks that I've never heard of.

Yup, I did the same. If the IRS audits us we may have to change our calculations but the absolute difference in tax owed should be small.

My understanding is that despite their reputation the IRS is usually fairly chill about this sort of thing if you demonstrate you had good intent. I hope I never have to test that though. Unambiguous guidance sure would be nice!

[draaglom]

People are speculating this is for e.g. when your coins are at an exchange; the currency hard forks; and the exchange does not (yet) implement the fork so you can't access the coins.

[modeless]

No, that's handled separately. You're not in possession of the coins if you can't access them, and you aren't taxed on them until you gain possession.

[Scoundreller]

Quite refreshing to see. Canada’s CRA publishes some crypto guidance, but delicately avoided any discussion about forks and airdrops, which is the only thing that’s unlike any other asset that someone buys and sells that goes up or down in value.

Clarifying the parts that are already clear wasn’t too valuable. Maybe useful for a consumer that thinks “I can trade all day and never pay tax”, but nothing actionable for any accountant.

[gamblor956]

This guidance specifically applies to forks where you receive the forked coins through an exchange because you held pre-fork coins in the exchange.

If you receive the new coins directly, this guidance does not apply to you.