The IRS has petitioned Coinbase, the largest bitcoin exchange in the United States, for personal information on all its users. The result would effectively create a sizable but incomplete government registry of bitcoin owners.
The move isn’t without warning. In September, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, which oversees U.S. Treasury organizations including the Internal Revenue Service,recommended that the IRS create a more formal strategy for monitoring all “virtual currencies” — bitcoin, with a market cap of nearly $12 billion is by far the largest in the world — as a means of countering tax fraud. – READ MORE