Another Internet Bubble Lesson (Pay Your Crypto Taxes) (opens in new tab)

If BTC is treated as property (as the IRS says), then no. You'll only owe capital gains tax on it at the point where you sell or exchange it. Your capital gain will be the amount you sold it for minus the amount you bought it for, minus any expenses incurred buying/selling it. (If you sell it for less than you bought it for, you'll have a capital loss.) It's essentially treated like shares of stock.

More details can be found in the IRS guidelines that were linked in the article: https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-drop/n-14-21.pdf (see questions 1, 6 and 7).

Probably because a lot of people who've gotten into Bitcoin mining don't have any experience with significant taxable income that isn't a wage.

It's not by any argument just saying "pay your taxes".

The article outlines an interesting situation specific to bubble valuations like the dot com boom or (possibly) crypto currency in which you can easily end up owing far more in taxes to the IRS than the current worth of your holdings.

That, to me, is worthy of discussion and a front page place on a tech news site.

to emodendroket's point, I recall reading an article that in the previous year (2016) that the IRS stated that very few people were claiming bitcoins in their taxes. I'm not versed on cryptocurrencies so I don't know how plausible it is that they know this, but it seems like something they're looking at now.