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The tax regulator also published a detailed guide on tax implications for virtual currencies. You could be on the hook to pay taxes if you sold, sent or exchanged for goods or services cryptocurrencies. If you received cryptocurrency as remuneration, that would be included in your income as well. So if you do make money using crypto you may want to declare those earnings before the IRS. Investing in cryptocurrency can be very tempting.
There are tons of upside potentials to cryptocurrency, but the reality is it can all be lost instantly through cybercrime or devaluation. Cryptocurrency also is very much like a roller coaster. If you enjoy the adrenaline rush and have a high-risk tolerance then it may be a good idea for you to invest in. Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Hossein Nabilou. Accessed Nov. Congressional Research Service. Selected Policy Issues.
People's Bank of China. Ripple Labs Inc. Securities and Exchange Commission. Department of Treasury. New York Attorney General. Internal Revenue Service. By Brian Edmondson. Learn about our editorial policies. Reviewed by Akhilesh Ganti.
Akhilesh Ganti is a forex trading expert and registered commodity trading advisor who has more than 20 years of experience. Learn about our Financial Review Board. Fact checked by Emily Ernsberger. Emily Ernsberger is a fact-checker and award-winning former newspaper reporter with experience covering local government and court cases. She also served as an editor for a weekly print publication.
Her stint as a legal assistant at a law firm equipped her to track down legal, policy and financial information. Sometimes these are representative of ownership in decentralized autonomous organizations, which are organizations that share governance rights and returns to a committee of participants by allocating them tokens — a bit like stock shares.
There are project-specific tokens used in specific online games or among individual communities. There are NFTs, which are unique non-fungible tokens that have been used as representing ownership over things like digital artworks.
Tons of these are being minted daily at this point. So, there is a very large landscape. The pure currency aspect of it is a huge market on its own, but a drop in the bucket of the total applications of crypto and blockchain technology today. Is it just the eye-popping returns or is there more to it? But there are also real, practical infrastructure and technology benefits. And people have been considering whether crypto technology can be used to deliver government aid. Right now, if a hacker gains access to your crypto wallet, they can drain it and you may have no recourse.
But the newer waves of wallet technologies and crypto exchanges are thinking hard about all the things consumers expect out of banking products and equities trading accounts. And then, of course, you also need regulation to prevent financial crime and scams, just like we have in other parts of the financial-services industry.
A lot of people lost a lot of money in the GameStop and Dogecoin run-ups and crashes. Consumers and investors need to understand that these are high variance, speculative assets. But when you get to the technology infrastructure pieces, GameStop and crypto can look very different. Cryptocurrency trading now looks a lot like equities trading — you have a brokerage account at an exchange, or potentially on a platform like Robinhood. But there are questions about how to properly structure those reserves.
If everyone simultaneously decided they wanted to divest, will stablecoins have the reserves to support that? I expect to see regulation around allowable assets and reserve design — just like we have with banks. Organizing the tax treatment of all these assets — and then, of course, ensuring tax payment — is essential. Another challenge is environmental: A lot of the most popular crypto technologies at the moment require tremendous amounts of energy to run.
Bitcoin and other early blockchains use a technology where you have to prove that you solved a very hard computational problem to record transactions securely. And solving those computational problems is taking up absurd amounts of energy. Newer blockchains use much less energy-intensive ways of validating transactions. The worst case would be to just treat it like historical financial products or like historical tech platforms without thinking about the ways in which crypto differs, both in terms of its use cases and in terms of its underlying technology.
An exercise at Kennedy School explores the dangers if large sums could be secretly sent to hostile nations.
The ruling party imposed a ban on transactions in May. Elsewhere, Egypt, Turkey and Ghana have sought to clamp down on crypto trading, wary of potentially vast movements of digital funds beyond their regulatory controls. Nigeria has one of the youngest populations in the world and is ripe for digital finance. With many people looking for ways to escape widespread poverty, pyramid schemes are proliferating. Trading in foreign currencies is an everyday activity for many. There are political factors too.
Some see cryptocurrencies as vital protection from government repression. Last October, Nigeria was rocked by the largest protests in decades , as many thousands marched against police brutality, and the infamous Sars police unit. More than 50 protesters were killed, at least 12 of them shot dead at the Lekki tollgate in Lagos on 20 October. The clampdown was financial too. Civil society organisations, protest groups and individuals in favour of the demonstrations who were raising funds to free protesters or supply demonstrators with first aid and food had their bank accounts suddenly suspended.
Feminist Coalition , a collective of 13 young women founded during the demonstrations, came to national attention as they raised funds for protest groups and supported demonstration efforts. They saw, for example, that people could decide to bypass government structures and institutions to mobilise.
It sent shockwaves and those shockwaves have continued. The episode reinforced the need many Nigerians felt to insure themselves against sudden moves by the authorities. Many organisations now keep some of their finances in cryptocurrencies.
Speaking anonymously to avoid reprisals from the authorities, a leading figure in one civil society organisation, whose accounts were also briefly suspended last October, said digital currencies were now a key insurance against hostile interventions. In February, the Central Bank of Nigeria responded by telling banks to close the accounts of all customers using cryptocurrencies.
The ban was at first a blow to an emerging industry of cryptocurrency brokers who relied on commercial banks to facilitate transactions between sellers and buyers. However, many customers found workarounds, said Marius Reitz, Africa general manager at Luno, a cryptocurrency trading platform.
The ban has made cryptocurrency trading harder to monitor and less safe. Platforms have also adjusted, by continuing to facilitate transactions as long as the currency being traded is not declared as a cryptocurrency. While some platforms experienced a hit in trades, for others, the clampdown has increased demand for cryptocurrencies, not dampened it. At the same time, Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo publicly rebuked the move. Another Nigerian government agency, the Securities and Exchange Commission, has been more open to creating a more regulated environment for cryptocurrency transactions.
However, for the purpose of this article, we restrict ourselves to simple person-to-person payments. These can be divided into 2 categories, each affected differently by a quantum computer. In the first type, a public key directly serves as the Bitcoin address of the recipient.
In the early days of Bitcoin, in , this was the dominant address type. Many of the original coins mined by Satoshi Nakamoto himself are still stored in such addresses. One of the issues with these addresses is the lack of a mechanism to detect mistyping of addresses for example a last checksum digit which is used, for example, in credit card numbers. An additional problem is that these addresses are very long, which results in a larger transaction file and therefore longer processing time.
Regarding the threat from a quantum computer, the public key is directly obtainable from the address. Since all transactions in Bitcoin are public, anyone can obtain the public key from any p2pk address. This would allow an adversary who has a quantum computer to spend the coins that the address had. In the second type of transaction, the address of the recipient is composed of a hash of the public key.
As a hash is a one-way cryptographic function, the public key is not directly revealed by the address. As was mentioned above, the public key cannot be retrieved from the address. The public key is only revealed at the moment when the owner wishes to initiate a transaction. This means that as long as funds have never been transferred from a p2pkh address, the public key is not known and the private key cannot be derived using a quantum computer.
If funds are ever transferred from a specific p2pkh address no matter what amount , the public key is revealed. From that moment on, this address is marked "used" and should ideally not be used again to receive new coins. In fact, many wallets are programmed to avoid address reuse as best they can. Avoiding the reuse of addresses is considered best practice for Bitcoin users, but you would be surprised how many people do not take this advice to heart.
More on that in the following chapter. Imagine that someone manages to build a quantum computer today and is therefore able to derive private keys. How many Bitcoins will be in danger? To answer this question, we analyzed the entire Bitcoin blockchain to identify which coins are vulnerable to an attack from a quantum computer.
As explained in the previous section, all coins in p2pk addresses and reused p2pkh addresses are vulnerable to a quantum attack. The result of our analysis is presented in the figure below. It shows the distribution of Bitcoins in the various address types over time. As can clearly be seen in the graph, p2pk addresses dominated the Bitcoin blockchain in the first year of its existence.
Interestingly, the number of coins in p2pk addresses has stayed practically constant circa 2M Bitcoins. A reasonable assumption is that these coins were generated through mining and have never been moved from their original address.
As p2pkh was introduced , it quickly became dominant. Most of the coins created since then are stored in this type of address. In the graph we see that the number of Bitcoins stored in reused p2pkh increases from to , and since then is decreasing slowly to reach the current amount of 2. This suggests that people are generally following the best practice of not using p2pk address as well as not reusing p2pkh addresses. At the current price this is over 40 billion USD!
Figure 1: The distribution of Bitcoins that are stored in address that are vulnerable to quantum attacks. Note that reused Segwit coins are presented in the graph but are otherwise not mentioned in the article. What can one do to mitigate the risk of Bitcoins being stolen by an adversary with a quantum computer? In the previous section we explained that p2pk and reused p2pkh addresses are vulnerable to quantum attacks.
However, p2pkh addresses that have never been used to spend Bitcoins are safe, as their public keys are not yet public. This means that if you transfer your Bitcoins to a new p2pkh address, then they should not be vulnerable to a quantum attack. The issue with this approach is that many owners of vulnerable Bitcoins have lost their private keys.
These coins cannot be transferred and are waiting to be taken by the first person who manages to build a sufficiently large quantum computer. A way to address this issue is to come to a consensus within the Bitcoin community and provide an ultimatum for people to move their coins to a safe address.
After a predefined period, coins in unsafe addresses would become unusable technically, this means that miner will ignore transactions coming from these addresses. Such a drastic step needs to be considered carefully before implemented, not to mention the complexity of achieving consensus about such a sensitive issue. Does that mean that the Bitcoin blockchain is no longer vulnerable to quantum attacks? The answer to this question is actually not that simple. In such an attack, the adversary will first derive your private key from the public key and then initiate a competing transaction to their own address.
They will try to get priority over the original transaction by offering a higher mining fee. In the Bitcoin blockchain it currently takes about 10 minutes for transactions to be mined unless the network is congested which has happened frequently in the past. As long as it takes a quantum computer longer to derive the private key of a specific public key then the network should be safe against a quantum attack.
Current scientific estimations predict that a quantum computer will take about 8 hours to break an RSA key , and some specific calculations predict that a Bitcoin signature could be hacked within 30 minutes. This means that Bitcoin should be, in principle, resistant to quantum attacks as long as you do not reuse addresses.
However, as the field of quantum computers is still in its infancy, it is unclear how fast such a quantum computer will become in the future. If a quantum computer will ever get closer to the 10 minutes mark to derive a private key from its public key, then the Bitcoin blockchain will be inherently broken. Quantum computers are posing a serious challenge to the security of the Bitcoin blockchain. In case your own Bitcoins are safe in a new p2pkh address, you might still be impacted if many people will not or cannot take the same protection measures.
In a situation where a large number of Bitcoins is stolen, the price will most likely crash and the confidence in the technology will be lost. Even if everyone takes the same protection measures, quantum computers might eventually become so fast that they will undermine the Bitcoin transaction process. In this case the security of the Bitcoin blockchain will be fundamentally broken.
These types of algorithms present other challenges to the usability of blockchains and are being investigated by cryptographers around the world. We anticipate that future research into post-quantum cryptography will eventually bring the necessary change to build robust and future-proof blockchain applications.
He focuses on the impact of quantum computing on cyber security and how companies should That is, I perform research on the inner workings of blockchain but also help out with software development in client projects. I also fa To stay logged in, change your functional cookie settings.
This statistic presents the opinion of Bitcoin investors on increased U.S. government regulation and oversight having a good impact on the. Cryptocurrency is only a type of extreme financial and emotional democracy. Even so, it is doomed in its present form. Its technology platforms. The Biden administration is preparing to release a government-wide strategy to regulate cryptocurrencies as early as February, with the.