The actions by the pirates at the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) against the 13,000 customers of Coinbase (NASDAQ: COIN) amounts to no less than an attempt to make them walk the proverbial plank. But the cornering of their victims like they have and leaving them with no recourse other than to stand and fight might prove, however, to be akin to the IRS stepping upon a Bouncing Betty of their own setting. They may have lit the fuse to a series of powder kegs towards their own demise and which concludes the path they chose when they ruled that cryptocurrency like Bitcoin was a commodity (and not a currency).
As a commodity, their own regulations stipulate that the tax filer calculate the value “in dollars” at the time of the conversion out of the commodity. What that means is that the IRS left it up to the filer while simultaneously opening itself up to a legal challenge of what, exactly, do they mean by “dollar” in their regulations and forms. I offer this idea for a legal defense to the 13,000 Coinbase customers (and/or their attorneys) now backed into a desperate corner with the belief and hope that its foundation upon simple rules of grammar, jurisprudence, honesty and truthfulness will be sufficient to sway any jury of their peers that the IRS may muster.
Dr. Edwin Vieira, renowned attorney with four PHDs from Harvard and who has also successfully argued cases before the U.S. Supreme court provides an in depth look into both the historical and legal basis of the DOLLAR standard that the laws and economy of this country is built upon.
Yes, I say the “Dollar standard” because, as Dr. Vieira so effectively demonstrates in his paper, titled “What Is A Dollar?,” there never has been a “gold” standard nor was there a “silver” standard. A dollar was the standard and it was established to be a silver coin of a certain weight and purity. Dollars were even in existence and in wide circulation before the founding of the country and before the Coin Act of 1789 establishing the country’s first mint.
The term “dollar” is found in two separate locations in the Declaration of Independence (1776) 13 years before the first U.S. dollars were minted. The IRS, the Federal Reserve Bank and corrupt politicians have colluded to deceive the American public that the Federal Reserve Note (FRN) replaced the dollar (which it has not neither in a legal sense nor a physical one).
The IRS should be aware of the legal definition of the dollar since they are, after all, the drafters of their own regulations and of their own forms requiring taxpayers to declare their incomes in “dollars.”
I’m confident they, indeed, are but they are also partners in crime and accessories after the fact with the fraudulent Federal Reserve Note and are not going to admit that a Federal Reserve Note is not a dollar nor has it ever been. This fact that an FRN is not a dollar can be proven with some basic rules of grammar involving the definitions of nouns and adjectives and the rules involving pluralities.
A one dollar FRN is a singular item (i.e. one “thing”). A 5, 10, 20, 50, or 100 FRNs are each, respectively, also singular items. Therefore, a “twenty dollar bill” cannot also simultaneously be 20 things and one thing at the same time! It is, in fact, a “note” or a promise to PAY 20 dollars (which it doesn’t do and which means it is a fraud). The word “dollars” on all the higher denominations grammatically are adjectives describing the note (the “thing” and thus the noun). They are also singular indicating a loan, single thing, that being a note.
So what is the value of Bitcoin in real dollars then (i.e. the silver and legal one)? The U.S. Mint still issues them and “sells” them for approximately $20 FRN so if one were to take the current price of Bitcoin (let’s round it off to $10,000 in FRNs to keep it simple) then the value of Bitcoin IN DOLLARS would be approximately 1/20 of that amount (5%) or only $500 (quite a tax savings).IF a jury can be persuaded of its correctness, the ramifications of a loss in court are huge. It would mean all the wages that employers and employees report as income in “dollars” are also grossly overstated. That could open the IRS to three years’ worth of re-filing by taxpayers entitled to huge refunds. And it exposes the fraud of the Federal Reserve Note.
What possible defense could the IRS offer? One that comes to mind is the idea that the FRN “became” the dollar with the passage of the Legal Tender laws. Unfortunately, the real silver dollar circulated side-by-side with the FRN for over 50 years after the F.R.N. was introduced and it was redeemable for real dollars during most of that time as well so it could not possibly be one and the same as the thing it was redeemable for. No, Legal Tender didn’t cause the FRN to become the thing it promised to pay. Instead, what it did was to force creditors to accept it IN LIEU OF (i.e. instead of) real dollars or they would lose the creditor would legal standing to collect the debt (the legal tender clause itself states “for all debts public and private”). Another long-shot defense might be that it became “the dollar” by public acceptance and usage but I would argue it became publicly used only as a result of fraud, deception and coercion and not by way of law.
But that is really just the tip of the iceberg (1% of it) because there are two kinds of FRNs: One is the paper version with signatures, serial numbers, etc. and the other type (99% of the “dollars” in circulation) exists solely in digital form. Granted, there has been legislation passed to enable commerce to keep up with technology changes and making accommodation for things such as digital signatures in documents but I doubt strongly there is anything remotely hinting that a digital token of a worthless IOU also became “the dollar.”
To summarize, the IRS (a government agency) who has drafted its own regulations and forms including the legally defined word “dollar” knows or should know the meaning of the word “dollar”. It also knows or should know that a note is a promise to pay an item and is not one and the same as the item. It should definitely know the difference between a noun and an adjective and between singular and plural. It is also the agency that spent considerable effort to study Bitcoin and itself concluded that it wasn’t a currency and was, instead, a commodity despite the fact that the Bitcoin community refers to Bitcoin as a currency. The burden is on the IRS to defend their own writings, regulations, and forms.
Lastly, but perhaps most importantly, the Federal Reserve Bank is a private enterprise (a corporation) while the IRS is a government agency. The “Fed” can be sued (good luck) but government agencies charge citizens with crimes. Courts are responsible to enforce laws but are also required to insure laws and regulations use precise and concise definitions and meanings of words. Words are, in effect, the very foundation of law and without those clear definitions we are no longer a nation under law but of despotism and tyranny. May God please bless the United States of America with honest and fair laws.
Robert Lefebvre is a Bitcoin user since 2012 when he invested a meager amount of savings accumulated while teaching at a special needs school. He is currently involved in three of his own Bitcoin startups involving Bitcoin education, a Bitcoin ad network for website operators to earn Bitcoin and a Bitcoin-real estate investment strategy.
His Bitcoin Cash tip address is 1KaiNZBXLfhT7UFKnsfPHcU5W1JdVQ1Vry
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