Bitcoin4RegularFolks

By  Damian Davila  | Updated November 29, 2017 — 10:31 AM EST Robert Arnott said it best, "In investing, what is comfortable is rarely profitable." The decentralized, peer-to-peer cryptocurrency system called bitcoin puts this claim to the test. The following is how you would have fared throughout the years if you had bought $100 worth of bitcoin back in 2011. 2011: Off to a Good Start For purposes of this comparison over time, the bitcoin market value prices from the CoinDesk Bitcoin Price Index are used, and no fees or additional transactions are assumed, for the sake of simplicity. By buying $100 in bitcoins on Jan. 1, 2011, you would have benefited from a low market value of 30 cents per bitcoin and received a total of 333.33 bitcoins for your initial purchase. Since bitcoin traded at 6 cents for most of 2010, you would have timed your initial purchase right. In this first year, you would have had your first taste of the cryptocurrency's high volatility. For...

Bitcoin speculators aren’t the only ones who stand to cash in from the crypto-currency boom. Uncle Sam is now set to collect back taxes from thousands of customers of a digital currency exchange who failed to report bitcoin transactions. In a ruling on Tuesday, a federal court judge ordered San Francisco-based Coinbase to comply with a summons that requires it to identify 14,355 accounts, which have accounted for nearly 9 million transactions. The order, which covers transactions between 2013 and 2015, comes after a prolonged court fight that began when the IRS demanded that Coinbase provide detailed personal information for more than a million customer accounts. The IRS subsequently  limited its demand  to ask only for accounts that conducted bitcoin transactions--either exchanging bitcoin for dollars, or sending or receiving coins from another bitcoin user--worth $20,000 or more. Coinbase claimed that even the narrower IRS request represented an illegal imposition, ...

Topics Reference Advisors Markets Simulator NEW Academy   Coinbase Loses Court Case Vs IRS: Must Hand Over User Info By  Rakesh Sharma  | November 30, 2017 — 1:38 PM EST  SHARE     MORE ON BLOCKCHAIN AND BITCOIN Bitcoin Price Crashes; Other Cryptocurrencies Follow Is Bitcoin In Bubble Territory? Jerome Powell: Cryptocurrencies Aren't Big Enough to Matter Yet Bitcoin Price Crosses $11,000 One of the advantages of using bitcoin to conduct transactions is the cryptocurrency’s anonymous nature. But that anonymity may be in danger. In a legal precedent of sorts, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) won a  court order  yesterday asking Coinbase, America’s largest bitcoin exchange, to provide identification information for users who conducted annual transactions worth more than $20,000 on its platform between 2013 and 2015. (See also:  The IRS Says Only 807 Peopl...

Associated Press/Susan Walsh On Wednesday, a court ordered Coinbase to hand over information to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) about users that made transactions over $20,000 between 2013 and 2015. That request includes information on 14,355 Coinbase customers across 8.9 million transactions, according to the court order.  The order comes nearly a year after the IRS first requested records on all of Coinbase's transactions between 2013 and 2015 as part of its efforts to catch tax evaders. Just hours after wild fluctuations in bitcoin prices  put Coinbase's servers on the fritz , the cryptocurrency exchange is facing a new challenge: the US government.  Coinbase must turn over information about thousands of its users to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), a US district court ruled on Wednesday. As one of the leading exchanges for cryptocurrencies like bitcoin and ether, Coinbase has seen billions of dollars exchanged on its platform— some of which the I...

Coinbase Inc.  lost a bid to block an  Internal Revenue Service  investigation into whether some of the company’s customers haven’t reported their cryptocurrency gains. U.S. Magistrate Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley in San Francisco ruled that the tax agency’s demand for information isn’t overly intrusive. The price of bitcoin has been soaring and crossed $10,000 Tuesday. With just 800 to 900 taxpayers reporting bitcoin gains from 2013 through 2015 in a period when more than 14,000 Coinbase users have either bought, sold, sent or received at least $20,000 worth of bitcoin, “many Coinbase users may not be reporting their bitcoin gains,” she wrote. “The IRS has a legitimate interest in investigating these taxpayers.” The company, one of the world’s largest virtual currency exchanges, has been sparring since last year with the IRS over its summons -- and continued to resist turning over the information even after the agency scaled back its request in July. C...

SAN FRANCISCO — A federal magistrate judge has ordered Coinbase to comply with a  summons  from the Internal Revenue Service that seeks personal information on more than 14,000 account holders on the cryptocurrency exchange. U.S. Magistrate Judge Jacqueline Corley of the Northern District of California  in an order dated Tuesday  ruled that the IRS had successfully shown that the information it is seeking is relevant to its investigation of whether U.S. taxpayers are significantly underreporting gains from trading bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.  "That only 800 to 900 taxpayers reported gains related to bitcoin in each of the relevant years and that more than 14,000 Coinbase users have either bought, sold, sent or received at least $20,000 worth of bitcoin in a given year suggests that many Coinbase users may not be reporting their bitcoin gains," Corley wrote. According to her  judgment , which was entered Wednesday afternoon, Coinbase must t...

Bitcoin  has been on a wild ride in the last 24 hours. Around 1:30 PM ET on Tuesday,  the cryptocurrency crossed the $10,000 per coin mark  for the first time. The currency shot to more than $11,250  about 20 hours after hitting the major $10,000 milestone and is up 8.21% on Wednesday. It has since settled slightly lower, at $10,766.32 per coin. Business Insider found that Nasdaq, the exchange operator based in New York,  is planning to launch bitcoin futures . The contracts would allow investors to bet on the future price of bitcoin and would likely help lessen volatility in the market. Other cryptocurrencies are hitting major milestones  of their own on Wednesday.  Ethereum briefly traded above $500  and  Litecoin hit $100  for the first time. Courtesy of Markets Insiders

As the price of the cryptocurrency continues to soar, the Federal Reserve apparently is giving thought to having a product like bitcoin for its own. William Dudley, president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, said at a conference Wednesday that the Fed is exploring the idea of its own digital currency, according to reports from Dow Jones. Any product likely would be well off in the future, he said, adding that it would be "very premature" to estimate when the Fed would come up with its own offering, according to Bloomberg. That sentiment comes even though Dudley said he views bitcoin is "more of a speculative activity" and not a stable store of value. As the central bank official spoke, bitcoin struck a new high. Just a day after hitting $10,000, it eclipsed the $11,000 mark . Dudley is not the first Fed official to address the surging popularity of bitcoin. Philadelphia Fed President Patrick Harker, in remarks made at a conference in September, sa...

Hedge fund manager Mike Novogratz, who is starting a $500 million fund to invest in cryptocurrencies, says the bitcoin rally still has some serious legs. After surging more than sevenfold since December, the largest and most widely known digital currency will end the year at $10,000 from about $8,400, he said. Smaller rival ether will trade at $500 from almost $370 Tuesday. Bitcoin is like digital gold in that “gold has value solely because people say it has value; bitcoin is built on an amazing technology, there’s a limited supply of it,”  Novogratz said in an interview on Bloomberg Television.  “This whole revolution came out of a breakdown in trust in the 2008 crisis.” Bitcoin climbed to a record $8,374 today after Novogratz’s comments. It had earlier tumbled as much as 5.4 percent after $31 million was stolen from a separate cryptocurrency known as tether. Those gyrations aren’t new as it’s been a tumultuous way up for the virtual asset, with three separa...