First Website Improvements Released!

[Constance Hilliard]

Hello Everyone!

First, today I bring you your first round of website improvements! The payout addresses section in your Settings tab has doubled in size and now includes some information that I'm sure you all will find valuable! Pay thresholds now include the minimum, maximum, and default (free, no fee) values. This information will help in adjusting the thresholds for your payouts and give better feedback as to why a payout may or may not go out for the amount you think.

The estimated fees are a new feature I thought of while training and answering some support tickets. This fee is a little different than the full network fee for a normal transaction, as our number of outputs is greater, meaning less overhead charges. Whether or not you will incur a fee, that value will be present just for your knowledge. This value is only an estimate based on the last transaction that went through. So it is something of a ballpark you can expect if you set your threshold to a value that will incur a fee.

The help page is also being updated as I go through and make changes to the certain sections of the website I am working my way through.

Secondly, I had thought I was going to be more active on the forums during my training period, however, I have been so busy that it hasn't been the case. I apologize for that. So far my training has been going great and you have all been wonderful. Some of you may have noticed that before now I am fairly active in helping with the support site. I was busy learning and setting up a lot of these new tools that will help us scale and stay organized.

Thirdly, strawpoll. I know it's not the in-house voting system for coins you still want, that is coming probably after tax season. Until then, the triad here at Prohashing has had some dissent among ourselves and leave it to you to resolve with a vote via strawpoll! Also, I am creating a different thread in the forums for the website wishlist in which I can pull ideas for little features to be voted on. These things have the greatest chance of being added to my next release of bigger changes. I will edit this post and put the link to the thread below with the strawpoll url when I get that up. Once I get sufficient responses there, I will add a link to the strawpoll I create from it here as well sometime tomorrow morning.

Lastly, the next feature. As you all know taxes for us in the U.S. are coming up sooner than we all would like to think about. We need to do some prep work to the site, at the advice and behest of our lawyer, to ensure we are compliant to the best of our abilities and give the Cryptocurrency world a good reputation (plus, we like our jobs). This will include the required fields for more information from all miners with rigs operating in the U.S. and with more than $600 in earnings so we can send the appropriate tax forms you need (1099 Form). There will be more information on this early next year.

Dissent among the triad poll: https://strawpoll.com/9gdc6p9a

New website wishlist: viewtopic.php?f=7&t=2781&p=13460#p13460

Enjoy!

[centar]

Whoa, you guys are going to issue 1099s to users? I think you may want to really think about that, I can guarantee you there will be a MASS exodus. Regardless of people paying taxes or not, I highly doubt many people are going to want to give info out like that. Also, how will you determine US residency, based on IP - or is this the honor system?

[Steve Sokolowski]

1099 forms have to be issued to users; there isn't any other way we are willing to operate. While I don't think that many people will leave, I'm sure you can understand that it would be better for the business to fold than for us not to issue these forms. We'll be requesting addresses and names beginning in a few weeks.

There will be an option to declare yourself an international customer, in which case no form will be required.

Before you get worried, these forms are not a statement that you owe a certain amount of tax, and we are not withholding earnings. This is standard practice for practically any business transaction, like when Chick-fil-a purchases chicken from its supplier. It is up to users to provide accurate information so that they can receive the documentation necessary for filing their own taxes. This will also make it simple for people who have submitted tickets requesting data dumps, because the form will summarize exactly what they need.

Other than sending the forms, we aren't providing advice or recommendations to users about what action to take, and they should consult an accountant if they need to. No action is needed right now by anyone, and most customers will not be contacted anyway.

[Steve Sokolowski]

There's a minor issue with the fee estimator where the fees for bitcoin are showing zero now. We're looking into why this didn't appear in testing and should have a fix by the morning. Since the feature didn't exist before this release, it isn't a regression and we decided not to revert.

[Ewil]

I will guarantee you will lose nearly (if not at least) half of your miners if you require the 1099 information. This isn't a guess or minor conjecture - this is a fact I would stake money on - money which you apparently are willing to lose, although I have no idea why you'd cut your nose off to spite your face.

Between myself and my friends, we have excess of 5 dozen ASIC units (and other smaller rigs) that are presently aimed at Prohashing. The moment those requirements go into effect (information for the 1099 forms) we will leave. I encourage everyone else who will leave, speak up now, so "the triad" can develop their next business plan, or realize how screwed they are making themselves.

[Foxx]

1099 forms have to be issued to users; there isn't any other way we are willing to operate. ...

... Before you get worried, these forms are not a statement that you owe a certain amount of tax, and we are not withholding earnings. This is standard practice for practically any business transaction, like when Chick-fil-a purchases chicken from its supplier. It is up to users to provide accurate information so that they can receive the documentation necessary for filing their own taxes. ...

yes, but you are also required to file any 1099 you issue, with the US authorities.

[AppleMiner]

So be illegal miners, declare yourself as international miners. No data will be required and nothing will be mailed to you.

If you want to lie to the pool then I would guess the pool just can't be held responsible when the IRS comes back and asks them later why they didnt send you the required 1099 forms, and they can show, well this person opted in as an international miner so we weren't required, if they lied on the form its not our fault. I think its more an IRS liability. If you dont want to admit your US and get caught they have deniability they tried to comply with the data they were given by you.

But if you have in excess of 5 dozen ASICS I am guessing you are making some money, or paying some bills?
Not sure how you are moving that much around, hosting company and paying for it in crypto, but eventually you may want to cash in some of those coins. Do you think the bank wont notice 10K deposits or 4K electric bills coming and going monthly and start to investigate or ask about taxes?
I think coinbase turns in for US customers accounts that over 20K in use per year? they had a court case but did they start to volunteering that info for 20K and above to IRS since then?

[jimbo207]

Will SSNs be required? I assume 1099s will say $0.00 since coins are not legal tender and there is no real way to value it until it is sold for legal tender. Asking for a friend.

[Steve Sokolowski]

I will guarantee you will lose nearly (if not at least) half of your miners if you require the 1099 information. This isn't a guess or minor conjecture - this is a fact I would stake money on - money which you apparently are willing to lose, although I have no idea why you'd cut your nose off to spite your face.

Between myself and my friends, we have excess of 5 dozen ASIC units (and other smaller rigs) that are presently aimed at Prohashing. The moment those requirements go into effect (information for the 1099 forms) we will leave. I encourage everyone else who will leave, speak up now, so "the triad" can develop their next business plan, or realize how screwed they are making themselves.

In that case, I wish you the best of luck. The lawyer told us this is what we need to do, and we're going to do it. We have a lot of assets to protect and have decided not to risk any penalties.

As I pointed out a few months ago, we're looking to take mining out of the shadows and make it a business for everyday people, just like Coinbase and Gemini came along and displaced shady operations like Mt. Gox. This post shouldn't be surprising and is in line with what I've been saying over the past week or two in regards to our hiring a lot of people, improving our service quality, and not competing on price.

I don't agree with your assertion that most people are going to leave. Most customers aren't going to be impacted, because most don't earn enough money or live in the US anyway. And even if some customers do leave, there will be new customers who join because they see that we are complying with these regulations and view that as a sign of honesty. Coinbase issues these forms to many of their customers and they have so many customers that they are tripling their office space.

[Steve Sokolowski]

Will SSNs be required? I assume 1099s will say $0.00 since coins are not legal tender and there is no real way to value it until it is sold for legal tender. Asking for a friend.

No to my knowledge right now. All that's needed, I think, is name and address to mail the form - but I'll check on that. All we have to do to comply is fill out about 8 fields on a short form and send it in the paper mail to the address. We already have the data in the database.

We may also include a printed report that is not tax information but which summarizes earnings for the year by coin and by rig, as a free service.