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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

The 10,000 bitcoins that seven years ago famously paid for the delivery of two Papa John's pizzas would be worth more than $74 million today.

The exploding value of the cryptocurrency since its first real-world transaction in 2010 is one reason the U.S. Internal Revenue Service is pushing to see records on thousands of users of Coinbase Inc., one of the biggest U.S. online exchanges. The company's digital currency platform allows gains to be converted into old-fashioned dollars in transactions that the IRS alleges are going unreported.

Coinbase and industry trade groups are fighting back in court, claiming the government's concerns about tax fraud are unfounded and that its sweeping demand for information is a threat to privacy.

Source: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-09/coinbase-escalates-showdown-on-u-s-tax-probe-as-bitcoin-surges

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

The Verge reports

[On November 29], Coinbase suffered a major defeat at the hands of the Internal Revenue Service, nearly a year after the case was initially filed. A California federal court has ordered Coinbase to turn over identifying records for all users who have bought, sold, sent, or received more than $20,000 through their accounts in a single year between 2013 and 2015. Coinbase estimates that 14,355 users meet the government's requirements.

Original Submission

[Update] There have been new developments to this story:

According to Techcrunch:

Yesterday, we wrote that Coinbase customers were being charged multiple times for past transactions.

While some speculated that the erroneous withdraws were down to a Coinbase engineering issue, Coinbase issued a statement saying it wasn’t liable for the duplicate charges. The blame, instead, rested with Visa for the way it handled a migration of merchant categories for cryptocurrencies, Coinbase said.

While you can read my post yesterday for an in-depth description of what happened, the basic gist is that about a month of old transactions were refunded and recharged under a different merchant category. Many users saw the recharge come through before the refund processed, making it look like they were double charged. Honestly, the issue was likely exacerbated by existing payment rails — it’s normal for refunds to take multiple days to show up on credit and debit statements.

Here is the joint statement by Visa and Worldpay (Coinbase):

Over the last two days, some customers who used a credit or debit card at Coinbase may have seen duplicate transactions posted to their cardholder accounts.

This issue was not caused by Coinbase.

Worldpay and Coinbase have been working with Visa and Visa issuing banks to ensure that the duplicate transactions have been reversed and appropriate credits have been posted to cardholder accounts. All reversal transactions have now been issued, and should appear on customers’ credit card and debit card accounts within the next few days. We believe the majority of these reversals have already posted to accounts. If you continue to have problems with your credit or debit card account after this reversal period, including issues relating to card fees or charges, we encourage you to contact your card issuing bank.

We deeply regret any inconvenience this may have caused customers.

The original story follows below.