In a recent article appearing in the Virginia Tax Review, I analyzed the income tax issues that arose from hard forks of cryptocurrencies That article focused on the August 1, 2017 hard fork of the Bitcoin blockchain that resulted in the creation of Bitcoin Cash, a new cryptocurrency. The hard...

Bitcoin replicates many of the formal aspects of real estate transactions. Bitcoin transactions have features that closely resemble grantor names, grantee names, legal descriptions, and signatures found in real property deeds. While these “Bitcoin deeds” may be interesting, they are not...

A tax on the harmful elements of finance — a tax on systemic risk — would raise revenue and also lower the likelihood of future crisis. Financial institutions, which pay the tax, would try to minimize its cost by lowering their systemic risk. In theory, a tax on systemic risk is perfect...

Smart contracts and cryptocurrencies have sparked considerable interest among legal scholars in recent years, and a growing body of scholarship focuses on whether smart contracts and cryptocurrencies can sidestep law and regulation altogether. Bitcoin is famously decentralized, without any...

To date, Internal Revenue Service (I.R.S.) guidance on cryptocurrencies has been thin. When the I.R.S. has issued guidance, it occasionally mishandles the technical details (such as confusing air drops and hard forks). More personnel (and personnel with greater technical expertise) would allow...