[thrush]

Legitimate companies are definitely susceptible to being taxed as they are supposed to report certain parts of their financials. The average consumer will likely be affected by this tax by an increase in the BTC prices they are paying for goods.

This could be strategic to prevent illegitimate companies from using BTC because if they are not paying taxes properly, the government has motivation to investigate the company. Honestly, I think this is probably a good thing because it will make it hard for companies dealing in illegal services to operate (although only slightly).

A concern I have is whether taxing transactions will make it more difficult to make quick and easy transactions on the internet (one of things that makes bitcoin so great).

And, I am also a little skeptical because it will be really hard to enforce even for legitimate companies. I think that if the government wants to support cryptocurrency, and tax it at the same time, then they're going to have create their own cryptocurreny protocol. I almost reckon that they'd need a system where the blockchain was hidden from outsiders (basically, transactions would not be anonymous to the government, and users wouldn't be able to publicly see transactions aside from confirmations from the government).