Coinbase: ‘Partial Victory’ Appears To Put End To 12-Month Legal Battle

Coinbase has hailed as a “partial victory” a court order to hand over transaction details of almost 15,000 customers to the government.

In a summary of the US exchange’s now year-long legal battle with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), communications officer David Farmer confirmed previous hints that only three percent of the original data demands would be sent to lawmakers.

The issue focuses on IRS suspicions that Bitcoin holders transacting through Coinbase were not paying appropriate taxes on profits.

After Coinbase ignored a request to inspect every transaction made through the company from 2013-2015, a court summons saw months of posturing before the IRS’ position finally became untenable.

The tax authority’s request, commentators and now legal entities confirmed, was too “broad” in its scope.

“...While today’s result is not the complete victory we hoped for, it does represent a substantial and unprecedented victory for the industry and the hundreds of thousands of customers that would have been unfairly targeted if it weren’t for our action,” Farmer said, adding Coinbase was “reviewing” the order to turn over all transactions of $20,000 or more.

The results provide a brief respite for Coinbase as its infrastructure feels the strain once again from Bitcoin price volatility.

Coinbase is performing maintenance to improve performance under high traffic given the large volumes we saw today. We expect buys and sells to be offline for 1-2 hours. Customers can still access their accounts, deposit and withdraw.

— Coinbase (@coinbase) November 30, 2017

As USD rates fluctuated by thousands of dollars over the past 48 hours, the exchange saw its servers go offline as it failed to cope with demand. Similar events occurred earlier this year as hundreds of thousands of new users opened wallets on a weekly basis.

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