The latest article reports this fact. Yesterday I got into a conversation with 
So we have good news in terms of growth yet we still have a lot of grey areas and regulatory uncertainty. Is cryptocurrency fully legal? Can it be used practically without relying on a CPA to determine the tax significance of every transaction? Congress is asking for answers to this question and I would suggest you write, email and call your congressman if you hold cryptocurrency to push for at a minimum additional clarity and preferably a better more realistic tax status.
The current policies depending on which interpretation is correct, threaten to tax cryptocurrency out of existence. Simply by enforcing the tax code in the most radical interpretation the IRS can single handedly prevent mainstream adoption of this technology because people will be afraid to spend cryptocurrency. In addition, if someone gives you a cryptoasset as a gift, how is this treated by the tax code? Just receiving a cryptoasset could be confusing, so people might be afraid to even set up a wallet out of fear someone somewhere might send them something valuable which can later crash in price.
The entire cryptocurrency industry, as well as the online gaming community, must join forces to figure out how to deal with regulatory risk. If taxes are deemed to high or too complicated then there is a political process which has shown to work for other industries and which worked for the Internet itself (Internet Tax Freedom Act). I would also say, if we pay attention to what isn't be done rather than the nice words congress says about blockchain technology then we can get an indication of what regulators and policy makers actually think about the tech. The lack of a similar to Tax Freedom Act would indicate that cryptocurrency is not ready for a push to mainstream adoption and is still seen by the IRS and law enforcement as a tool for tax cheats, organized crime, and terrorism. When the policies begin to reflect the words uttered publicly then that in my opinion is the signal to go all in on blockchain tech as it will have been given the green light be regulators rather than merely being ignored.
References
- https://www.jbs.cam.ac.uk/faculty-research/centres/alternative-finance/publications/global-cryptocurrency/#.WR4T-WjythF
- https://www.financemagnates.com/cryptocurrency/bloggers/bitcoin-tax-implications-six-facts-every-businessperson-must-know/
- https://www.aier.org/blog/dont-tax-bitcoin-out-existence
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Tax_Freedom_Act