1 entry tagged illinois. All writing.
SEPTEMBER 30, 2026 Two-Tenths of a Percent, If Illinois Can See You Illinois just became the first state to tax Bitcoin transactions directly — a 0.2% Digital Asset Tax Act taking effect January 1, 2027. I went looking for what it actually reaches, using two Kankakee residents as the test case: one who owns a Bitcoin ETF inside an ordinary brokerage account, and one who wants to buy coffee with sats over the Lightning Network. The tax lands hard on one of them, barely touches the other, and can't see the actual coffee purchase at all — and the reason why says a lot about how a state can tax a ledger it doesn't control.