COLORADO SPRINGS — Gov. Polis recently announced Colorado will become the first state to accept cryptocurrency for payment of taxes and other fees.
This won’t affect you this tax season, but it will soon. Colorado will make history this summer, becoming the first state in our nation’s history to accept cryptocurrency as payment for taxes, with driver's license and hunting licenses to follow.
But how will this impact taxpayers in our state? Your taxes will still be the same in dollar amount whether you pay in cash, by card, or in cryptocurrency. It’s no different. The state is just offering another form of payment for taxes. I spoke with Ben Weiss, the CEO of CoinFlip on how he thinks this will affect Colorado.
“I think they’re going to set off a wave of other states looking at this and Colorado is showing the nation that they are pro technology, pro innovation and this is going to also be good for collecting revenue to fund dollars going in and out of the state,” said Weiss.
“One of the arguments against BitCoin and cryptocurrency was “Oh, well you can’t pay taxes with it so it’s not a currency.” Well, now we can and there’s nothing more legitimate than a payment form in this country than paying your taxes and now you can do that.”
Colorado won’t hold any cryptocurrency because a third party will convert the cryptocurrency back into traditional dollars.
Gov. Polis says the first step is accepting bitcoin and cryptocurrency as tax payments this summer. It is yet to be determined what other fees will accept cryptocurrency in the months to follow.
