☕ Good news: Tax Day is over! Bad news: bitcoin coffee...

That $5 coffee costs more than you think when you pay in bitcoin — plus Hoskinson says Bitcoin's quantum fix can't save Satoshi's coins, and Drift dumps Circle for Tether after a $285M exploit. ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ Thursday, April 16, 2026 Buying coffee with bitcoin is easy. The resulting tax burden is not. The Cato Institute's latest report puts a number on what most bitcoin users quietly dread: buying a coffee with BTC every day can generate over 100 pages of tax filings a year. That's because the IRS treats every spend as a taxable asset sale — requiring cost basis calculations, gain or loss tracking, and Form 8949 entries for each transaction. The report urges Congress to create a de minimis exemption or eliminate capital gains taxes on bitcoin payments entirely, with the 2026 1099-DA rollout adding fresh urgency to the issue. Read the full story → Want deeper dives on crypto policy every week? State of Crypto breaks down the legislation, regulation, and politics shaping the industry. Click here to sign up. Tech Cardano's Hoskinson says Bitcoin's quantum fix is a hard fork that can't save Satoshi's coins Charles Hoskinson argues that BIP-361, Bitcoin's proposed quantum defense, is mislabeled as a soft fork and would functionally require a hard fork — something Bitcoin's culture has always rejected. Worse, he says the proposal's zero-knowledge recovery mechanism only works for wallets built on BIP-39 seed phrases introduced in 2013, leaving roughly 1.7 million pre-2013 bitcoin — including an estimated 1.1 million attributed to Satoshi — permanently unrecoverable if the proposal passes. Read more → Business Drift gets $148 million funding from Tether and partners as it replaces Circle stablecoin with USDT after massive exploit Drift Protocol, the Solana-based perpetuals exchange drained of $285M in a North Korean exploit on April 1, is relaunching with Tether's backing. Tether is committing up to $127.5M, with partners adding another $20M, in a revenue-linked structure designed to cover roughly $295M in user losses over time. As part of the deal, Drift is ditching Circle's USDC as its settlement layer in favor of USDT — a pointed rebuke given that Circle's refusal to freeze stolen funds during the hack drew fierce criticism from the crypto community. Read more → Consensus by CoinDesk Join CoinDesk at Consensus Miami, where agentic commerce, crypto at scale, and institutional integration are redefining the future of finance. Save 20% with the code HEADLINES Get your pass → Know someone who should be reading this? Share this newsletter See all of CoinDesk’s newsletters    CoinDesk, Inc., 61 9th Avenue, 5th Floor, New York,NY,10011,USA, Unsubscribe Manage Preferences   Copyright © 2026 CoinDesk, All rights reserved.