Kinsella On Liberty

Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 094. This is the audio for episode 004 of Liberty Talk, a weekly Google hangout-based podcast with Jeffrey Tucker and me (Google Plus page; Youtube Channel). [Update: for more on whether bitcoin is ownable property, see this Facebook thread. And see: Tokyo court says bitcoins are not ownable. See also: "in the WSJ article Tax Plan May Hurt Bitcoin, the article notes that legal tender laws are, in fact, jeopardizing BTC. Bitcoins are now classified by the IRS as “property” “instead of” as legal tender money, meaning capital gains taxes are owed on transactions. I mentioned this danger in my talk; a similar problem afflicts the re-adoption of gold or silver as money.  But as I noted in the Q&A to my talk, I am not persuaded that bitcoins are ownable resources—things subject to property rights. The IRS here assumes that something is either money or property. This is one danger of BTC advocates using the language of property rights to describe bitcoins. I would argue that bi