The reason I ask:
I live in Portugal and due to the recent financial crises where Portugal had to receive EU "aid" from TROIKA, citizens are heavily scrutinized.
Everything (almost everything) you purchase will (should) be invoiced with your tax number. This is to prevent a parallel economy where resellers and service providers don't declare a significant amount of their the transactions. In order to erradicate this practice, everyone should be asking for a receipt with the fiscal number. To endorse this and educate the people, the finance department has some sort of lottery, where a randomly selected invoice will give the fiscal number holder a price (previously a car, now 50.000 Euro).
As a consequence, if you spend more money than you declare on your tax form, you will certainly be investigated. Any money that lands on your bank account over 500 Euro has to be justified. There is so much control over your money, it is actually scary! If you want for instance give a friend 1000 Euro, you need to declare this and pay taxes (I am not arguing how easy it is to circumvent this)! Also, it is forbidden to pay any transaction over 500 Euro (I think it is 500 Euro - the limit may be 1000 or 2000 Euro) in cash!
Your house, cars, etc. - everything is known to the finance department and if you own more than you can justify, you are in deep problems (unless you belong to the political class).
So this is why I asked, how people dealing with bitcoin have been handling the enormous increase in value. Of course you could just keep the bitcoin. You could spend it (not that easy, as only few items or services can be paid directly in bitcoin). So how do you take advantage of the value that bitcoin produced?
While this is not clear to me, I simply won't risk anything with bitcoin. And right now it seems pretty shady to me (from the viewpoint of the finance department).
Regards,
Vitor