Ugh. I'm worried about the tax implications of this. The fact that I enjoy trading stocks and did so pretty frequently the past few years made my already horrendous tax reporting burden even more miserable. Now that the SEC is getting involved in regulating crypto market, it's gonna get more complicated and I foresee a nightmarish tax filing burden in the years to come for people trading and even just investing in crypto currency. I always do my own taxes and it usually takes me about 8-12 hours to prepare my return electronically and now it's only gonna get worse as I trade crypto currency a little bit now and am planning to hold some of them for a long time. Determining profit from trades as valuations fluctuate so wildly is gonna be difficult as the reporting burden will inevitably fall on the user and I doubt reporting will be as streamlined as it is for stocks since crypto is so new and the exchanges probably will struggle to make it easy on the user to download their trades in TXF format to turbo tax or whatever for the first few years like you can with a normal stock broker. This means one will have to manually calculate short and long term gains which is a true pain in the ass.

Yeah the Republicans say they want tax reform but they haven't done jack sh*t about anything even though they have the presidency and both houses of congress. SO I have very little faith they'll do anything to ease our already crushing tax burden. They're gonna regulate the crap out of crypto currency and tax people to death is what I'm afraid of.

The silver lining is it could create a good buying opportunity if new coins drop in price in reaction to the news.

The government ruins everything. One of my long term goals is to get out of this crony capitalist police state and the SEC announcement just gave me one more good reason to want to leave. :(

Thank you for sharing this even if it is not good news. It's important