RE: Steem Rewards History CSV Exporter (via SteemData.com)
This is an unclear area tax law other opinions are definitey welcome as we try to make sense of this new technology, hopefully grounded in some degree of research like you and I. We are both in pursuit of the same knowledge. Nothing is 100% certain, however I am attempting taking a common sense route based on what I can only guess is the IRS' next move if Steem gets big.
Also just to add some thoughts on video games. With regards to World of Warcraft there are many avenues to convert gold into fiat (however some might violate Terms of Use). I also believe there was a way to exchange the gold for 30 days of game time which has a real world economic value. The items traded on the short-lived Diablo 3 real world market may have been considered convertible virtual currency as I understand real money was being spent on items or earned on sales of items. I can only hope the IRS would look at video game taxation on a case by case basis because (I believe) most people just play the game without trying to make any money off of it there's no need for there to be unlimited uncertainty for just buying a video game to play it.
Oh, yes! I forgot they had done that! Some googling reveals that they issued tokens for real money, then these tokens could be sold on the auction house in-game. Then they expanded this so you could use the tokens to purchase other Blizzard goods.
That certainly sounds like an exchange, doesn't it? I'd say that puts this token and gold into the virtual currency camp, because they now provide a means of exchange for both money to tokens and tokens to gold, all within their platform. But they only provide an avenue to convert money to services and goods they provide. They don't provide a means of exchanging these items to other currency, so does this satisfy the definition of a convertible virtual currency? Rather confusingly, when the IRS talks about virtual currencies in the 2014 guidance, they only care about convertible virtual currencies.
So even though you can use gold and tokens to pay for goods and services provided by Blizzard, it doesn't appear to fit the definition of a convertible virtual currency, so it's not covered by the 2014 guidance.
But isn't this important? They provide no such exchange, they encourage no such exchange, but STEEM and SBD are fully endorsed and encouraged for use as currencies and there are APIs and web sites provided to make this happen.
Does the existence of a third party site willing to act as a "trusted" medium to facilitate the exchange of in game gold/tokens to other currencies constitute an exchange? I'm having trouble finding a legal definition that validates -OR- invalidates this, but I suspect it does not.
Good questions, I'm glad I'm not the only one pulling my hair out:)
I'm going to make WoW and Diablo 3 taxation into a discussion topic on my blog to highlight the perplexity of tax law. It's not just selling gold that has issues, some raid groups also get paid to carry noobs through raids. These types of nuances I will flesh out in all the painful details, without taking up more space in this comment section haha.