Coronavirus Impacts on Bitcoin

At the end of 2019, the IRS quietly published a set of virtual currency guidelines that broadly lumped together mainstream cryptocurrency such as Bitcoin and Ethereum with honest-to-god Fortnite V-Bucks and Roblox Money.

You see, the IRS has been caught flat-footed over and over with every passing year that crypto currency has spread. They were slow enough recognizing the growing importance of Bitcoin that it wasn't until 2013 that they designated a team to begin planning for how to handle the currency and they still haven't figured out how to handle it.

Dating back even earlier than this, the IRS has ALSO been blindsided at every turn by non-crypto "Gaming" digital currencies.

Game Currencies- for simplicity, hereafter referred to as, uh, "Game Currencies"- run a wide gamut but the majority is exactly what the IRS failed to recognize in Fortnite and Roblox: a non-convertible, non-transferrable currency that cannot reasonably leave the confines of its game.

For as correct as the IRS eventually got it, they've still been handling Game Currencies wrong, and it has informed the ways they still get Crypto wrong.

Many game currencies ARE transferrable and ARE dangerously viable mediums for exchange and laundering, and they have been around longer than Bitcoin.

In these years since, the spectrum of cryptocurrencies has exploded and the applications of game currencies has become strangely homogenized.

Convertible game currencies like Warcraft gold persist, but they are the exception rather than the rule.

The IRS has long since missed the boat on game currencies.

If their random grab at the most obvious game currencies they could think of was any indication, there will be more broad and clumsy strokes before there are any real answers.