Cycling UK Forum

I was considering speculating with bit coin and could make capital gains. Would tax be levied and how would such levies be paid?

Not if you make all the necessary arrangments carefully...
ps drop the Chancellor a line and ask if he knows anyone who could give you some advice.

BP Prudhoe Bay shares have done well recently, up 28% in the last month and in 12 months up 371%!! Keep my eye on them all afternoon now just in case they drop too much, although the eldest daughter is fed up of renting. I could buy her a decent house if I sold them now.
Never considered that bitcoin, all a mystery to me.

Hmm.... do I launch into a tirade about the immorality of making money out of money (but only if you have money) whilst sitting at home doing nothing... or shall I keep quiet

Say what you like, I've always earned good money and invested it. The opportunities are there for everyone.
Some people work all their life and then when they get to 60 they haven't got a pot to pass in. I'm 60 in October and going on a 10 day cruise............fantastic!!

mumbojumbo wrote: ↑24 May 2022, 3:45pm I was considering speculating with bit coin and could make capital gains. Would tax be levied and how would such levies be paid?

Yes. The assets may be treated like others for capital gains:
https://www.gov.uk/hmrc-internal-manual ... rypto22050

But mining may be treated as trading:
https://www.gov.uk/hmrc-internal-manual ... rypto40200

Jonathan

Don't !

Very annoying keep putting links on Jonathan.

Or if you made major losses eg Luna could you offset your profitable investments gains against.
Your bike is probably a good investment. If you bought a good brand with inflation you probably would get what you paid for it in 20 years and had the enjoyment of riding it.

philvantwo wrote: ↑25 May 2022, 8:14pm Say what you like, I've always earned good money and invested it. The opportunities are there for everyone.

Very sadly the opportunities are not there for everyone, if you are living hand-to-mouth you have no cash with which to gamble/speculate even if you wanted to.

Apologies if I seem overly combative, I think Mr Johnson has sensitised me with his famous comment during COVID that to avoid transmission people in the same household should use separate bathrooms. He clearly lives on another planet if he thinks the majority of people in this country live in houses with one bathroom per occupant.

Stradageek wrote: ↑27 May 2022, 7:50am

philvantwo wrote: ↑25 May 2022, 8:14pm Say what you like, I've always earned good money and invested it. The opportunities are there for everyone.

Very sadly the opportunities are not there for everyone, if you are living hand-to-mouth you have no cash with which to gamble/speculate even if you wanted to.

Apologies if I seem overly combative, I think Mr Johnson has sensitised me with his famous comment during COVID that to avoid transmission people in the same household should use separate bathrooms. He clearly lives on another planet if he thinks the majority of people in this country live in houses with one bathroom per occupant.

As you mention, the opportunities to employ usury to extract the effort of others in making real value (goods & services) is not generally available to everyone, especially the millions of everyones who are having the value extracted from them via wage slavery, renting and similar parasitic arrangements of the already-rich.

But imagine if everyone did have such opportunities. The logic would surely be that no one would produce real value because it's far less effort to sit back as the various mechanisms of usury magically get you something for nothing. But since no one is producing real value (those goods and services again) the extraction via usury mechanisms would cease to function! Shares in nothing equal ..... nothing.

**********

Usury used to be a sin. Being parasitic on others via the theft of their efforts and production was regarded with distain by all but the various aristocracies, who claimed a divine right to "rule" - i.e. pursue their various war ambitions, paid for by milking the various peasantries and consuming a goodly portion of them as cannon-fodder (or sword fodder).

The Medici found usury a great way to extract value from those producing it whilst failing to produce any themselves. It paid for their wars and the purchase of various positions of power, amongst much else they accrued. At first they laid off the sin on to the local Jews, who could be a fine source of usury income whilst also being freely vilified in the traditional manner, for being Jews but also now being usurers. Eventually, usury became so attractive to various aristocracies that they normalised it. No longer a sin, then. We'll do it ourselves.

We live with these milk-the-underlings arrangements still. Of course, anyone happy enough to employ the usury and other such magic money-expanding cons may now join the aristocracy, via various small doors by which one may join their ranks. Buy some shares (but watch out for cons by the really big aristos). But some folk will put aside their feelings of justice-as-fairness in favour of justice-as-exploitative-property-laws. They're only human after all.

Cugel, a sponging ole pensioner meself, mind.

Apologies if I seem overly combative, I think Mr Johnson has sensitised me with his famous comment during COVID that to avoid transmission people in the same household should use separate bathrooms. He clearly lives on another planet if he thinks the majority of people in this country live in houses with one bathroom per occupant
A third of oaps live this way

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ ... -alex-hern

"But, he said, “you shouldn’t feel bad. Everyone here knows what they’re getting into, especially during LARP season. It’s no secret that everything we buy is a scam on some level. The question isn’t ‘is this token a scam,’ because they all are, the question is ‘is this scam done well enough to convince other people to buy?’”"

Crypto currencies are basically digital tulips but worse. They have nothing to back them and no inherent value beyond which those trying to buy them put in them. Morally I actually think the usury thing is less of an issue here. Unlike investments in companies that then have to cream off a cut from workers (without wealth of their own to invest) productivity to pay shareholders, the only losers from crypto are people who had spare cash to put into it.

What is a bigger moral issue is the environmental and tech damage done by the mining requirements of most of the currencies. The carbon emissions from bitcoin mining are bigger than many smaller countries and large numbers of computationally powerful computers (and all the precious metals in them) end up doing wasted on mining cryptocurrencies. This creates shortages of graphics cards in the market, driving up costs for people trying to advance science with supercomputers and video gamers trying to just enjoy some spare time.