I think a lot of them likely sold it when it hit $1, or $100. Few of them likely expected it to keep going, and going. There are a few such people but they are not that large in number.
They are so rich due to bitcoin now and so focused on bitcoin I'd see no reason for them to remotely come here. Not even worth their time.
People in America could be approached by the IRS or others if they sold Bitcoin to dollars, if they bought a bunch of houses with those dollars. I did buy a plane ticket using Bitcoin in 2017 but the website I used probably took some of the Bitcoin to pay for their service and the rest of the Bitcoin amount was probably exchanged for digital dollars meaning the airlines themselves probably didn't take the Bitcoin directly. Some coffee shops in Vietnam said they were accepting Bitcoin but I decided not to buy any coffee with Bitcoin.
Someday, I hope airlines, real estate agents and others eventually do in fact accept Bitcoin directly if they aren't already. But until then, people should buy Bitcoin and hold onto it for many years or many decades, for as long as it takes kind of thing, people got to think long-term and be super crazy patient with investments and everything, especially in this transitional time in human world history which is going crazy right now like never before.
I'm against the IRS but I'm not going to go out of my way to try to get their attention to like sue me, arrest me, fine me, or whatever. My dream would be to someday wake up and find out the IRS was ended. I say as bad as Steem and Hive whales have been, some of the worse whales are in fact the Internal Revenue System or Service (IRS). People probably should NOT spend too much Bitcoin until maybe many years from now depending on what ends up happening these next few years in the 2020s in world history.
Wise.
The rumor is the IRS tends not to always focus too much on transactions and/or other things which may be under $10,000 USD, generally speaking, and I am not saying that is absolute, that might be relating mostly to debt-relating things with loans, banks, etc. But if that is an accurate number, that might also be a way to stay under the "RADAR" or whatever and not to say people are invisible as the NSA and others can spy on a lot of people and figure out a lot of what people are doing. But for the most part, if people are using dollars or other fiat currencies, pay your taxes.
But not that taxes are right. I don't know what the current laws are in different countries relating to an attempt to tax or penalize or whatever Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. First of all in America, many things can and should violate the 4th amendment meaning it is actually not the business of the IRS or others to know. On the airplane, I got a questionnaire asking how much Bitcoin I have. I said none. It is true that I have no Bitcoin because Bitcoin lives on the blockchain. You technically can only obtain access to Bitcoin using a 12-worded passphrase seed or a key password of random digits and numbers or something. John McAfee gave a good summary of what Bitcoin is and is not.
The IRS may seek after knowing how much money you might have. But some have argued to say that something like Bitcoin is not technically money or anything else that the IRS might be going after. But nonetheless, right or wrong, the IRS and others do try very hard to go after people for all kinds of things and many times tyrannical government are in fact wrong but that doesn't mean we should be say excessively reckless about it.
If you keep it in private wallets and not exchanges this might be true. If it is in the coffers of exchanges they may more actively track it.
Technically, even if Bitcoin is in private wallets, the addresses and transactions can still be discovered and followed on some of the websites where it shows the transaction logs.
Yep. There are ways around that if people truly wish to go that route. Though you'd need to send it through different wallets and some using wrapped bitcoin or something with a privacy layer.