OT: Does anyone have any bitcoin?

Only if you mined them yourself yonks ago when it was still relatively easy. It has become something of in intangible speculative instrument.

A shake down of cryptocurrencies is inevitable probably occurring shortly after large volumes of sucker money has piled in.

Cautionary tale here:

When I was in IT strategy I did a bit of research, and bought £10 worth. So far I've spent about £200 worth and have about £200 left.

Despite that I'm not a massive fan of cryptocurrencies. However there are some interesting possibilities with the distributed ledger tech that the blockchain delivers. But you probably won't hear about them without the ever-lurking spectre of the crypto-cowboys.

I bought £1000 in 2015, sold them in 2019 at a massive profit. I wouldnt risk buying any now as I believe the value is due to crash.

Mike

Does the taxman know?

Of course.

Mike

He does now, but did he before? ;)

Not very likely, since if you base a currency on nothing its hard to calculate its value. Also if we want to guzzle energy simply convert all currency to bit coin, the wallet encryption codes and keys use a huge amount of computing power and hence electricity as it is, Leave bank notes in a vault and they use nothing.

If you look at the way economies work, at the end of the line is a value of a person in that economy. that is how capitalism is built. It used to be built on gold of course and maybe now should be built on lithium grin, however whether the country makes things with robots or people the value of what is produced is decided by market forces, and taxation for governments to keep the infrastructure going, and protect the vulnerable. Brian