Tax payment has always been a thorny issue when it comes to cryptocurrency trading; the reason, contrary to what the media coverage claims, is not that cryptocurrency traders are all evaders criminals who refuse to pay the tax due but, more simply, the lack of regulatory clarity and the incapacity of the institutions of adequately regulate the world of blockchain industry. In these years we have seen all sorts of things, governments that claim to charge VAT on exchanges, governments that claim to equate cryptocurrency trading with forex while at the same time claiming that crypto are not real money and others still preventing the deduction of losses; in such a scenario, demanding that people pay taxes on capital gains earned by investing in cryptocurrencies is simply insane. The demonstration of how true this is comes to us directly from the USA, a country that will certainly have its limits and that even in the past has often proved schizophrenic in the declarations of the institutions, but to which it cannot be denied that it has concretely tried to regulate the seriously encrypted. Starting next year, for example, the US tax authorities will explicitly ask citizens to declare the possession of cryptocurrencies and any capital gains; this, however, took place following a definitive clarification by the IRS which will allow citizens to quietly declare their cryptocurrency profits without risk of running into problems of any kind. To support it, among others, is one of the major players in the sector, LukkaTax, which until now has been committed to supporting business users in the tax return, but which, starting in 2020, also intends to devote itself to consumer customers; Lukka's CEO, Jake Benson, himself declared this to Cointelegraph, stating that:

This year we focus on the retail investor because for the first time in six years, the IRS has made it clear to taxpayers how they want to treat cryptocurrency. There is a new question that appears first in the IRS program 1 tax form which asks if transactions in virtual currencies were performed in the year covered by the declaration 

In practice, 2019 will be the first year for which the IRS will explicitly ask taxpayers to declare how many cryptocurrencies they have; LukkaTax will therefore offer support to US users in the payment of taxes, against an annual subscription of just twenty dollars. It is precisely this that leaves us, as Italians, weird, because not only in the US the situation is clear enough to allow taxpayers to declare their profits in cryptocurrencies without problems, but the cost of professional advice is just $ 19.95 , while in our country to do something similar it is necessary to bear significantly higher costs and, worse still, there would still be no guarantees whatsoever on how the Italian tax authorities could react. The problem, as is known, is that the major cryptocurrency exchanges do not issue an annual statement of transactions and, in the absence of documents certifying their operation and that they are accepted as valid by the revenue agency, the Italian tax payer is found substantially unable to declare. The other thing that Italians find inconceivable is that just under half of Americans provide the tax return personally, this is because it is a simple procedure for anyone, while in our country it is almost unthinkable to present one's own declaration without using the support of a CAF or an accountant. There is therefore much talk in our country of tax evasion, we often point the finger to the USA as a yardstick, but what nobody says is that the US system is infinitely simpler and clearer than the Italian one. It is therefore not a question of tax pressure, which, indeed, when it comes to financial returns, is in our country all in all honest (a capital gain of 26% is paid on capital gains), the problem is precisely the lack of clarity and the unnecessary complexity that characterizes the Italian tax authorities; we do not know how many more years will be needed before finally even Italy gives itself a regulation that allows cryptocurrency traders to easily pay taxes, what we know is that at present, in case of dispute, the tax payer would have no way to prove their reasons for the simple reason that Italy does not consider the documents printed by the exchanges valid and the exchanges, for their part, do not provide an annual statement as do the forex platforms. It would therefore be appropriate to stop indicating the USA when we talk about tax evasion, because in the other countries evasion will also be lower than in Italy but it is also true that the responsibilities of this, before taxpayers, are institutions that do not have never done anything to simplify the system and, indeed, every year that passes make it increasingly difficult and cumbersome, which ends up inevitably representing an incentive to evasion and this is true not only for cryptocurrencies but, more generally, for any type of activity.