Ciphersmith

@mholt6 @TravelGov Precisely.

Hong Kong: On March 23, 2026, the Hong Kong government changed the implementing rules relating to the National Security Law. It is now a criminal offense to refuse to give the Hong Kong police the passwords or decryption assistance to access all personal electronic devices including cellphones and laptops. This legal change applies to everyone, including U.S. citizens, in Hong Kong, arriving or just transiting Hong Kong International Airport. In addition, the Hong Kong government also has more authority to take and keep any personal devices, as evidence, that they claim are linked to national security offenses. Read more: hk.usconsulate.gov/security-alert…

@TravelGov People said bitcoin is censorship proof. Sure it is. It's as censorship proof as the human ability to stand up in the face of the state's monopoly on lawful violence.

@BitPaine Why would anyone who believes in BTCs monetary mission be using Coinbase? They're the devil, along with any KYC exchange.

It’s probably time to boycott Coinbase.

Does it yield or doesn't it? It doesn't have to be a security to get taxed on capital gains. Everything held as an asset is taxed that way. Your coffee futures contract, your house, your collectible car. Fact is, BTC was engineered by Core to give yield rather than be used as a medium of exchange. This is the price.

The SEC says Bitcoin isn't a security. Congress wants to tax it like one anyway. Gary Gensler, the most aggressive SEC chair in history, called Bitcoin a commodity. Not a security. Bitcoin is a commodity under federal law. But the Parity Act treats it like a stock. The result is every Bitcoin transaction becomes a taxable event. Buy coffee with Bitcoin? Capital gains. Tip someone? Capital gains. Spend it like money? Tax event. That's not regulatory clarity. That's regulatory sabotage. Tax it like a commodity, it works as money. Tax it like a stock, it becomes unusable as money. The inconsistency is the point.

@BTCGUS21 @TFTC21 Not at all. I say let a million anonymous digital assets thrive and let the best ones win. You want to arbitrarily decide the winner of the game by trying to shame everyone who wants monetary competition.

@TFTC21 Truth ₿e Told.

Folks, we told you this was coming, and today the mask is fully off. A couple weeks back we reported, based on solid sources, that Coinbase was quietly lobbying to kill a real de minimis tax exemption for Bitcoin while pushing one that applied only to stablecoins like USDC. We laid out the clear incentives in our deep dive. Coinbase made 1.35 billion dollars in stablecoin revenue last year, up 48 percent year over year, almost entirely from yield on the Treasuries backing USDC. A proper Bitcoin de minimis would let people spend sats on everyday purchases without triggering taxable events on every transaction. That directly competes with their centralized yield machine. We called it what it was. Policy that protects Coinbase’s float rather than advancing neutral Bitcoin adoption. Brian Armstrong pushed back hard. He called our reporting totally false and misinformation while insisting he was personally lobbying for Bitcoin de minimis. Some accused us of lying or spreading rumors. We stood firm. We offered to have Brian on the TFTC podcast to clear the air. We waited. Now the latest draft from Reps. Horsford and Max Miller on the updated PARITY Act framework has dropped. It confirms exactly what we warned about. It gives a de minimis exemption to stablecoins but leaves Bitcoin out entirely. It keeps the punishing double taxation on Bitcoin mining fully intact while carving out relief for passive validation, basically staking. This is not an oversight or sloppy drafting. It abandons any pretense of technology neutrality and deliberately picks winners. Dollar-pegged stables and staking get the breaks, while actual Bitcoin usage as money and Proof-of-Work mining get kneecapped. Without de minimis for Bitcoin, every small Lightning payment or sat transaction still forces cost-basis tracking and IRS headaches. Paying your plumber in sats or grabbing lunch with Bitcoin remains a taxable event. Stablecoins, being pegged and low-volatility, get an exemption they barely need. The real beneficiary is protecting that massive USDC reserve float and the yield it generates. Meanwhile, American Bitcoin miners, already operating in one of the toughest, most capital- and energy-intensive industries, face continued double taxation while staking gets a pass. That is not neutral policy. It is industrial policy against domestic Bitcoin mining at a time when we should be leaning into energy abundance and securing the hardest monetary network. The Bitcoin Policy Institute is releasing a full statement soon, and we fully back the call for strong community pushback. Every Bitcoiner needs to contact their reps and make it politically radioactive to sideline Bitcoin while handing carve-outs to stables and staking. This language slows real adoption, entrenches custodians, and weakens American Bitcoin infrastructure. We weren’t lying. Our sources weren’t lying. The draft proves the reporting was on target. Those who rushed to call it misinformation owe the community some honest reflection. Brian, if you’re still open to that conversation, the invitation stands. Come on the podcast. No spin, just walk us through how this draft lines up with your stated support for Bitcoin de minimis. The mic is warm. This fight isn’t over. Bitcoin doesn’t need permission, but bad policy can delay sovereign adoption and punish the miners securing the network. We’re here to protect the protocol and the right of individuals to use sound money without turning every transaction into a compliance nightmare. Stay sovereign. Stack sats. Use Bitcoin as money anyway. Call your reps today.

@BlueRidgeBTC @TFTC21 @SullyMichaelvan @coinbase @brian_armstrong It's more likely that BTC fades into obscurity because the people who use it aren't going to tolerate every transaction being tracked for tax exemption purposes. You guys understand that de minimus requires a tracking mechanism, right?

@TFTC21 @SullyMichaelvan @coinbase could have been THE Bitcoin treasury company; they were years ahead of MSTR. Instead, @brian_armstrong chose the casino route. MSTR will be strong 100 years from now after Coinbase is long forgotten.

@ericbuhler @TFTC21 @BTCJFC 💯 But so few care about financial privacy anymore. Such a shame.

De minimis Bitcoin tax exemptions are an oppressive trap. They don't advance Bitcoin's use as form of money. They ensnare every person using it as money deeper into the crosshairs of the IRS and increase the burden on taxpayers. You still have to track every single transaction. Every UTXO. Every Lightning payment. The threshold just changes what you owe — not whether you have to prove it. The compliance burden never goes away. --- The government handed you a smaller cage and called it freedom. $200 exemption? Great. Now track 10,000 coffee purchases, prove each one was under the individual or annual limit, and document your basis on every spend. That's not relief. That's the same nightmare with a lower ceiling and increased cause for the IRS to open up an audit. --- There are only two worthy solutions worth discussing: 1/ Foreign currency treatment (IRC §988) — Bitcoin gets the same rules as euros. The IRS has to prove you gained above threshold. Burden flips to the government. 2/ True exclusion for Bitcoin used as a medium of exchange — not a deduction, not an exemption. A complete carve-out. Cash doesn't generate a taxable event. Neither should Bitcoin. Anything else is oppressive theater.

Generally agree, except that with the stroke of a pen they can regulate that other conceptual thing you're talking about. "There shall be no non-KYC exchanges." Done. Anyone who allows you to buy Bitcoin anonymously is now a criminal subject to enormous fines and imprisonment. The government has vast resources to be able to locate such exchanges. Maybe some new thing in the future will be tougher to detect, but it will still carry the risk of being illegal. It's not wrong that people don't want to skirt the law and take the enormous risk to hold their digital assets anonymously.

@TFTC21 My question is why are we still trying to play by the rules of a broken system? Making bitcoin transactions more private and untraceable negates the need to beg for crumbs from the state. This problem is better solved with technology than lobbying.

You lot wanted BTC to operate like a yield machine rather than cash, and this is the result. This is like saying we shouldn't tax dollar transactions below X because banks make yield on money market funds invested in Treasury notes. What makes BTC deserve the exception? The "community" (Core) could have engineered Bitcoin to operate more like cash (not directly yielding) and chose to make it a settlement system for institutional scale transactions. It's getting what it asked for. It's being taxed as a yielding financial product.

You can't rightly tax something that has no lawful yield. Conversely, why shouldn't you tax what has essentially become a financial product as other financial product capital gains are taxed? Despite the hyperbolic claims, BTC functions fans away more like an asset than money today, and that appears to have been intentional. Chickens... roosting. BTCers want Bitcoin taxed according to intentions rather than realities. That's not how tax codes work. I'd prefer no tax on internal money flows at all. I consider them immoral. They impoverish. What isn't immoral is to tax Bitcoin like you tax other things that generate yield.

Unfortunately, this bill only makes stablecoins tax exempt. This is the wrong direction to go in. It’s bitcoin that should have a de minimis tax exemption. Stablecoins are not decentralized and they are not permissionless. They’re not real money, they’re just fiat.

@CryptosR_Us "Expanding crypto custody services" is a nonstarter to begin with. Sorry, but regulatory capture of a financial privacy coin is something that doesn't interest me. I don't care whether banks need clarity. We adopted bitcoin to get rid of banks.

$59 TRILLION BNY MELLON: BIG BANKS WILL DRIVE CRYPTO ADOPTION CEO Robin Vince says large banks will be the main channel for crypto going forward, not a replacement. Why? Because banks already have clients, custody systems, and regulatory access. What they’re doing right now: 📊 Expanding crypto custody services 📊 Working on tokenization of money market funds and real-world assets 📊 Integrating crypto into existing financial infrastructure Adoption isn’t limited by demand, it’s limited by regulatory clarity and trust. Once that’s in place, banks can scale crypto products to existing clients quickly.

@RonSwanonson That's an easy one to figure out. Net interest on loans requires an increasing money supply. Hence 2% given that that is the target overnight funds rate. The Douglasites / social credit monetarists have been talking about this for 100 years. If you have usury, you have inflation.

I have a great idea 💡 If 2% inflation is “ideal”… Let’s all counterfeit 2% of our own money each year Then they don’t have to expand the money supply at all… We will do it for them

@vexl So true. Keep educating people on this point.

Still buying bitcoin on KYC exchanges and leaving it there? Friendly reminder: If you don’t withdraw your bitcoin, someone else eventually will...

@Rajatsoni But bitcoin really isn't censorship resistant.

Stop promoting your shitcoin Nothing that it can do is as important as a censorship resistant and incorruptible store of value (Bitcoin Using digital property instead (BTC) of physical property (real estate) as savings will change everything about how we interact with the world Everything changes once real estate investors finally figure out how Bitcoin works

@HodlHabit Go to jail, obviously.

The government demands your Bitcoin keys. Hand them over or go to jail. What do you do?

@Eyoyism If he actually said that then I would support him for the first (openly) gay president of the US.

one of our finest gay guys

@MaryRuwart So much this ^

If we truly owned our homes, we wouldn’t have to pay rent to the county to keep from losing them.

@Bitcoin_Teddy Not for long. Regulatory capture is incoming.

Bitcoin fixes this.

@TrendingBitcoin It's actually regulated by both now.

“#Bitcoin is not unregulated. It is regulated by algorithm instead of being regulated by the government bureaucracies. Un-corrupted.”

@theradaman Yeah, sound money fixes people's moral deficits. Right.

After becoming a Bitcoin maxi, I lost all interest in politics. Once you understand sound money, you realize most political problems aren’t meant to be solved. Because when the money is broken, everything built on top of it is too.