I told her it's not activated by default but she doesn't want to touch crypto with a 10 ft pole. She says if it's in there then tax authorities might eventually come asking if the feature becomes popular. And then she would have to keep evidence of not actually using it.
I think her concerns are overblown, but it shows how incompatible taxable transactions are with a privacy focused app. The two things should be kept well apart.
[Edit] Politically, it kind of defeats the purpose as well. You want to be able to argue that you have a right to privacy when it comes to personal communication. You don't want to be in a position of having to defend the privacy of trading securities.
This is why I also have my signal set for automatically disappearing messages. I want you all to try to delete your messages if you have iCloud turned on. It’s impossible and if you managed to do it they’re stuck on the server for 30 days. Apple is a spy service.
>What path would tax authorities use to ask Signal users (and only Signal users) if they've used cryptocurrency?
Tax law. In the UK, every single payment in cryptocurrencies, however small, is a taxable disposal that you have to include in your tax return if your total proceeds or gains from all investments are above a certain threshold.
I'm not ideologically opposed to cryptocurrencies and neither is my wife. She's just allergic to anything that could potentially raise tax questions.
Now I'm seriously wondering how hard is to fill taxes in the UK. I think I have done worse mistakes than a few cents in crypto and all I got was having to resubmit the forms.
Edit: On second thought, I don't own a business, so I guess nobody is going to look into my tax fillings with the same suspicion since they do not expect me to be doing anything funny with my accounting.
>Now I'm seriously wondering how hard is to fill taxes in the UK
Doing it correctly is non-trivial. You have to submit a so called computation for each individual disposal, which can easily run into several pages.
The algorithm for working out the cost of a disposal is actually a pretty interesting test case for learning a new programming language or paradigm. Try implementing UK share identification rules in SQL for instance :)
I think her concerns are overblown, but it shows how incompatible taxable transactions are with a privacy focused app. The two things should be kept well apart.
[Edit] Politically, it kind of defeats the purpose as well. You want to be able to argue that you have a right to privacy when it comes to personal communication. You don't want to be in a position of having to defend the privacy of trading securities.