The legality of Bitcoin mining depends entirely on your geographic location. The concept of Bitcoin can threaten the dominance of fiat currencies and government control over the financial markets. For this reason, Bitcoin is completely illegal in certain places.
Currently, Bitcoin mining is legal in the United States and the majority of other countries. However, you may want to research local laws where you live.
Computer chips used to mine cryptocurrency are made with toxic chemicals and precious metals that require literal mining to produce, ravaging the Earth's landscapes and depleting finite resources.
Mining. A cryptocurrency miner is required to register for GST if the annual GST turnover of their business is $75,000 AUS or more. However, a miner who does not reach such a GST threshold may still want to register for GST to claim from the ATO full input tax credits for the GST cost of its business acquisitions.
A 2022 report, titled Revisiting Bitcoin's Carbon Footprint, conducted by climate and economics researchers across Europe estimates that “Bitcoin mining may be responsible for 65.4 megatonnes of CO 2 per year … which is comparable to country-level emissions in Greece (56.6 megatonnes in 2019).”
Crypto Mining Scams Are Dangerously Rife
As more people continue to delve into the crypto mining space, cybercriminals continue to look for new ways to exploit unknowing victims.
The last bitcoin is expected to be mined sometime around the year 2140. The supply of bitcoin is limited to a final cap of 21 million.
Mining as a hobby
The mined coins will be subject to Capital Gains Tax on disposal. No expense deductions are allowable. It's also important to remember that personal use asset exemption rules don't apply to the capital gains made on the disposal of mined cryptocurrency.
The ATO taxes cryptocurrency as a “capital gains tax (CGT) asset”. This means you must declare the transactions (on your tax return) for every time you traded, sold, or used crypto. The ATO does not see crypto as money, and they don't class it as a foreign currency.
If you earn cryptocurrency from mining, receive it as a promotion or get it as payment for goods or services, it counts as regular taxable income. You owe tax on the entire value of the crypto on the day you receive it, at your marginal income tax rate.
How much energy does mining take? The Digiconomist's Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index estimated that one bitcoin transaction takes 1,449 kWh to complete, or the equivalent of approximately 50 days of power for the average US household.
Besides purchased grid electricity, crypto-asset mining operations can also cause local noise and water impacts, electronic waste, air and other pollution from any direct usage of fossil-fired electricity, and additional air, water, and waste impacts associated with all grid electricity usage.
The digital currency's disproportionate harm to the climate comes from its reliance on a computing process to verify transactions called “proof-of-work mining”, which requires huge electricity expenditures to participate, rewarding those who carry it out with the chance to win some new bitcoin.
Is it a form of gambling, speculative trading or a form of investment? At a broad level, crypto purchasing shares much in common with other forms of speculative trading as well as gambling. People stake something of value usually money on an outcome which is uncertain and this is a key element of gambling.
The Bitcoin blockchain pays for Bitcoin mining. You can consider blockchain as an employer of the miners. As such, the 'employer' pays the rewards for Bitcoin mining itself. No person or organisation owns Bitcoin mining.
The maximum number of bitcoins that can ever exist is 21 million, and as of March 2023, over 19 million bitcoins have already been mined. This means that there are only around 2 million bitcoins left to be mined, and once that limit is reached, no more bitcoins will be created.
Through information from banks, cryptocurrency exchanges, and financial institutions, the ATO can track crypto where it interacts with the 'real world' to follow the funds back to the taxpayer. Let's take a look under the hood at how the ATO tracks crypto.
The short answer is, the ATO already know when you're trading cryptocurrency. The ATO has developed a data matching program with cryptocurrency exchanges to ensure no cryptocurrency transaction sneaks through the cracks.
There is no way to legally evade your cryptocurrency taxes in Australia. Remember, Australian exchanges are required to share customer information with the ATO. In the past, the ATO has used this information to send warning letters to thousands of Australian crypto investors.
The ATO can track money trails back to taxpayers through data from banks, financial institutions and crypto asset online exchanges. “We are able to match this data to individuals transacting in crypto assets, so don't forget to include gains and losses in your tax return” Mr Loh said.
If you are carrying on a business in crypto mining, either by yourself or by providing services to a mining pool operator, then the crypto assets you receive from mining are treated as trading stock of your business.
You may need to include a capital gain or loss in your income tax return. You must report a disposal of crypto for capital gains tax purposes. Disposing includes when you: exchange one crypto asset for another.
Their confidence in Bitcoin is so strong that analysts at Ark Invest released a report claiming that its price could be worth more than $1 million by 2030. But for Bitcoin to get to that level, it would need to increase by more than 4,000% in just seven years.
But however Bitcoin evolves, no new bitcoins will be released after the 21-million coin limit is reached. Reaching this supply limit is likely to have the most significant impact on Bitcoin miners, but it's possible that Bitcoin investors could also experience adverse effects.
Just like a lot of other digital assets, Bitcoin has been built by its creator around the concept of a finite supply. This means that Satoshi has set a fixed upper limit regarding the number of Bitcoins that can ever come into existence. He set the Bitcoin supply upper limit at exactly 21 million.