FTX's $24B tax bill written down to just $200M Imploded cryptocurrency exchange FTX owes a lot of people a lot of money – but has convinced America's tax collectors at the IRS to give it a massive discount on its $24 billion tax bill. In a filing [PDF] this week to a Delaware bankruptcy court, FTX argued it should pay just $200 million of the $24,000,000,000 Uncle Sam …
Wallet IDs are published on the blockchain. That's not enough information for tax authorities to easily track and tie to taxable entities. Cryptocurrency is anonymous in the sense of "usually difficult and expensive to connect to another legal or physical identity".
"It is the very opposite of anonymous."
Not only what YOU have, but where you got it and where it came from before that. This is why they are paying close attention to "blenders" so that trail isn't obscured. Following the money without blockchain is much hard and can be covered up in many different ways.
And $200M now without a long, expensive court fight has much to recommend it. The IRS never would have been able to get that $24B even under the best circumstances; as the article notes, FTX might be able to raise $16B by liquidating assets. And whatever is returned to US customers offsets their losses, which they could have used to reduce their taxes, so the IRS in effect gets some of that back too.
f you owe someone $1,000 that's your problem. If you owe someone $1,000,000,000 that's their problem.
s/someone/bank/g or /government/g etc
For a bank or local government, yes.
But not if that someone is central Government. For the Feds, tax is just a means of pulling cash back out the economy to control inflation. Government spending is new money, and it needs to be pulled back out at some point. USGov can print money as and when it needs (e.g. Quantitative Easing).
But given that most of FTX's tax bill is likely to be based on things that aren't real money (capital gains, but notionally realised gains from trading which have since vanished in the collapse given the clusterfuck of their accounting), then it's of very little consequence to the overall economy. They'd probably prefer that private individuals get their deposits back out, even if the Govt hasn't underwritten them like FDIC insured bank deposits. In the overall picture, they'll probably collect CG on a bunch of those creditors as well when they get their money back givent he current "value" of certain coins.
Intriguing as to how you connect MMT to the far right, given that most of MMT's prescriptions (where they go past the basic description of the economy as it is) are pretty left-wing - job guarantees, robust social security, public transit and infrastructure. In any case, the latter is mostly Kelton/Deficit Myth rather than "core" Modern Monetary Theory.
In any case, I'm not really describing MMT - I'm just describing what Keynes knew in the 1930s when FDR (Far D. Right?) dragged the US out of depression, and what Kennedy knew in the 60s when the US was writing blank cheques (and nobody cared).
It's weird how economies tend to do really well when Governments spend money and pour liquidity into the economy (whether for wars, Space Races or anything else) and then crunch when you get some idiot who skipper Macroeconomics 101 treating Government spending like a business and talk about "strict fiscal rules", impose austerity and give out of load of guff about credit cards and "living within our means".
So instead of accepting $200 million, why not say, OK, liquidate the entire firm, get your $16 billion, pay back all of the customers there $11 billion, and then the Government walks away with the remaining $4-5 billion.
It's not like FTX needs to keep operating as a going concern, after all the sh&te they've pulled...
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