RE: Cryptocurrency Like Kind Exchanges: What Can We Learn From Gold?
From my perspective as a Crypto Nerd, Bitcoin and Litecoin aren't all that different. They basically are both magic internet money. Essentially, both have the same value proposition: you can send someone some digital cash anywhere in the world.
Ether is more like digital oil than digital gold, since its value depends primarily on using ether for various dapps. I would call that a significant difference.
What I would like to know is whether trading one turing complete currency such as ether for another turing complete currency (such as an Ethereum clone/fork or, maybe someday, EOS)would be close enough for a like-kind exchange. After all, the tokens provide access to different ecosystems.
See also: forks of various coins. Trading bitcoin for bitcoin cash seems to have a good argument for being a like-kind exchange, since they are almost identical. (Well, ETH vs. ETC would be a better comparison, perhaps.)
Thanks @smithgift, great point about hard forked currencies. An exchange of BTC for BCH outside of the context of receiving the second currency on August 1st hard fork is an interesting issue that deserves more attention, because they are derived from the same history and are similar (you can probably articulate better than me in this subject). That deserves some attention in my Part 2 of Like Kinds.
It seems we are on the same page with Litecoin/Bitcoin and Ether/Bitcoin, great to have a confirm.
Do you have any thoughts on the various Steem currencies?