Bitcoin [BTC] is tax-free in Wyoming; IRS or Feds cannot get anything out of Wyoming says, Wall Street veteran

Caitlin Long, former chairman and president at Symbiont.io and a Wall Street veteran who has been actively participating in the Bitcoin community since 2012, spoke about the current state of cryptocurrency regulation and taxation.

Long, who is at the forefront of making Wyoming a friendly state for cryptocurrencies and cryptocurrency startups/companies spoke about how Wyoming has passed bills and set an example for the rest of the U.S. to follow.

Caitlin Long continued:

“… we passed five bills last year and we have seven more coming in fact actually there in the committee hearing today two of them just passed the committee hearing. The one that’s most interesting… is the amendment which  defines utility tokens as a class of property, a new class of digital property in Wyoming”

She said that this was important as well as significant to lawyers because the property law is governed by state law in Wyoming, and if the token would be considered as a property it would not give the Feds the authority to regulate it in Wyoming.

Due to the above reasons, Long said that “IRS can’t get anything out of the state of Wyoming”.

Moreover, Caitlin Long continued that “Feds” and SEC’s chairman Jay Clayton has conflicting and opposite views as far as Wyoming’s laws related to cryptocurrencies are concerned.

The bills that Long mentioned earlier included the HB 19: Cryptocurrency Exemption bill which exempts taxes on cryptocurrencies.

Other bills that are passed by the Wyoming House of Representatives includes the HB 101: The Blockchain Filings Bill, HB 126: The Series LLC Bill.

The LLC bill alone is favorable towards decentralized protocols, as it enables LLCs to establish a compartmentalized series of members or managers, transferable interests or assets, and distributions to members.

Caitlin Long said that the world is not always black and white and that there is some upside to having a regulatory framework in the crypto-industry as opposed to the crackdowns that SEC and other regulatory bodies that have been making which includes taxation of cryptocurrencies.

Furthermore, Caitlin Long said that Bakkt or Fidelity and other big companies that are trying to enter the crypto-space could be a good thing because they could, with their lobbyists help with the regulatory frames. She continued:

“… and when Bakkt talked today about all the work that’s doing with Starbucks, that is about small payments and obviously if every Starbucks customer who pays with Bitcoin has to pay taxes on it that’s not good for Bakkt’s business so that’s one of the things I think that can help from a regulatory perspective.”

To explain the effects of too much regulation Caitlin Long referred to Antonopoulos’ idea about Bitcoin splitting off into two parts. She said:

” I think Andreas [Antonopoulos] talks about corpo-coin that what’s going to happen is if Bitcoin gets too corporatized that the industry will split off and bitcoin will go in its own direction and corpo-coin which would be the corporate version of Bitcoin will stay regulated and inside these big firms.”

She also added that these regulations, if it becomes too much will stifle a lot of innovations and that most of the well-known Bitcoin developers would not work for the corporate sector or the Wall Street firms.