Two credible possibilities present themselves. What do you think: is the IRS intending to crush bitcoin or are they just mind bogglingly incompetent? My money is on the former, but I suppose history would suggest that we can’t rule out the latter entirely.
This article follows the conventional practice of using the upper case Bitcoin to refer to the program or network and the lower case bitcoin to refer to the currency.
Those who have been paying attention will have noted something of a fiscal and monetary malaise – some might say crisis – stocking the world economy in recent years. These problems are no doubt in some considerable measure behind the recent interest in Bitcoin.
We humans are notorious creatures of habit. In many ways, that’s a good thing. Try to imagine all the brain power you’d have to expend if you really had to think about everything to be able to do it. Instead, once we’ve got it down pat, we don’t actually ever think about how to drive an automobile, use our cell phone, or open a mayonnaise jar. The precise physics of these activities are embedded in our neural pathways as an automatic response.