Tradesinsight? Plural? Because tradesinsight is a DNS not found, but tradeinsight.info will notify me when Nancy pelosi and other Congress members trade.
I'd suggest no one should investigate. So you lost your Bitcoin from some massive fraud? Too bad. That's the cost of playing that game. You should not get a free pass when you ask your government for assistance, and you should not have your government investing time and money looking into massive fraud concerning Internet Fun Bucks. You assume all risk when using this kind of money.
But you could tax someone for getting free gifts "in kind", so if you donated GPU time to do protein folding for GlaxoSmithKlein and they rewarded you with some internet points, they might be taxable on the difference.
Video games have all kinds of gold etc. that you can use to buy items. People will pay you real money to get your video game points if the video game is popular. So now is everybody who plays a popular video game committing tax fraud unless they report their gameplay to the IRS, because they earn points which have monetary value? That's not going to go over well.
They seem to want to go with something like it's not taxable unless you cash out. But that's a whole different kind of mess. If you trade somebody your Roblox points for their Fortnite points, is that cashing out, or are you both just trading your non-taxable thing for a different non-taxable thing? Is there any reason for this to be different than trading your sword for a crossbow within a single game? What about games that share worlds? What about games that have cryptocurrency in them?
The whole thing is a mess because "anything of value" is too broad to be practical, but narrow it an inch and you have a loophole.
I believe that the government should tax transactions involving money. If you cash out your bitcoin, then that's income, and should be taxed. I don't think unrealized gains of bitcoin should be taxed because bitcoin isn't money
> In particular, anything that needs regular updates is not "firm" in any sense.
It's really not about the updates that makes something "firm". Hardware is hard because it's a real physical thing. Software is soft because it's a non-physical thing, a set of instructions. Firmware is firm because it's less physical than hardware, and is more physical than a set of instructions. Firmware is software, in that it's a set of instructions, but additionally it needs to be loaded or flashed or programmed into the hardware, and stored either on-chip or in some ROM or NVRAM nearby, differentiating firmware storage from software storage on disk, tape, or some other peripheral storage. At the time, this made pretty clear sense, but over time, things were made murky by multifacted uses of NVRAM and peripheral storage.
So, "software built into hardware" is a pretty good definition. When you say something isn't firmware, it's software, that seems mistaken. All firmware is software, not all software is firmware. The size doesn't matter. Whether it's an application or a device driver doesn't matter. What defines the "firm" part of firmware is whether it's "built into the hardware". That's it.
So, yeah, you're having a definition problem. If you keep whatever definition that you currently have, then you're gonna have a bad time. If you try to "draw a firm line somewhere between the code in a tiny microcontroller running a battery charger and the operating system running on a general-purpose application processor", with this new definition, the question becomes "where is this code stored?". It doesn't matter how large it is, whether it's 100 lines of code in your battery charger or 1,000,000 LOC for your OS. If it's in on-board storage, it's firmware. If it's in peripheral storage, it's software.
How would you classify the operating system on a Macbook? The entire SSD is just a bunch of flash chips soldered to the motherboard - just like the BIOS flash chip.
I think we shouldn't forget the real stars of that movie, Maury Chaykin and Eddie Deezen, both playing epic nerds. Jim and Alvin were my heroes. Not so much now.
Bitcoin is neither your wallet nor your bank account. Some people want to treat it like a wallet, others like a bank account, others like their account on a stock exchange, others as an investment vehicle, others as a hedge against the dollar, and I'm sure there are other comparisons that make sense to people. Ultimately, Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency, which has both it's own unique benefits and it's own unique foibles.
... and I hope you realize that your bank account CAN be completely drained without the money being recoverable. If you're trying to say it can't, then might I suggest to watch some scam-baiting videos to see how those scammers operate, and how they try to do exactly that to the elderly and the unaware. You can call it a bug all you want, but it's quite possible to have your bank account drained; and, despite what others in this thread have said, an attacker can do that from thousands of miles away.
