How the world taxes cryptocurrencies
If you have ever wondered how profit from cryptocurrency is actually taxed, this review shows why there is no simple answer anywhere in the world.
Data Science in Finance and Economics
Bitcoin and investing
How a fringe experiment became part of the financial system — and what that means for an ordinary person weighing up whether and how to invest.
Questions I ask
- What actually happens to the price of Bitcoin after a halving, and can anything be predicted from past cycles?
- How does mining economics change as the block reward falls and transaction fees take a larger share?
- When does a cryptocurrency stop being speculation and become payment infrastructure?
- What does investing really cost once fees, taxes and time are counted in?
- What do stablecoins, tokenisation and central bank digital currencies mean for banks and states?
Bitcoin is an unusual research object. On one hand it is a technology with precisely defined rules that anyone can verify. On the other it is a market where the price moves on mood, news and expectations — on something that cannot be verified at all.
What interests me is the place where those two meet. The halving — the pre-programmed, publicly known reduction of the block reward — is almost a laboratory case for this. Everyone knows the date years in advance. And yet after every halving the market behaves similarly, and every time slightly differently.
Why this should matter even if you own no Bitcoin
Because the questions Bitcoin opened up have since moved into ordinary finance. Who actually guarantees the value of money. What happens when payment infrastructure stops belonging to banks. How do you regulate something with no registered address. The answers will affect people who never buy a single satoshi.
How I approach the topic
I try to separate three things that discussions about cryptocurrencies almost always blend together: the technology, the market and the ideology. Technology can be described. Markets can be measured. Ideology can at best be named — and it helps to know when we are reading it instead of data.
It is also true that a model built on three past cycles is a model built on three observations. That is not many. So I read the results of such analyses as a working framework, not as a forecast you can build a portfolio on.
Selected publications
What the halving does to Bitcoin's price
It shows how Bitcoin can be approached with data instead of opinions — and where that approach runs into its limits.
Journal of Risk and Financial Management
From the Journal
Trusting is fine. Blind faith is not.
You do not have to be an analyst to invest. But you should know what you are getting into, where your return is supposed to come from, and what would have to happen for it not to arrive. On why understanding the mechanism beats belief — and why it helps even when an investment is a good one.
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