Thanks a bunch for the link, that is very helpful.
Disclaimer: I am not a qualified financial or tax advisor. This is just my personal interpretation and discussion.
I don’t think this case is clear cut w.r.t. falling under income tax though. The two closest points relevant to our case (claiming tokens for non-commercial contributions) are 70 and 74. Neither of them fully apply here though.
70:
The receipt of additional units of a virtual currency or other tokens may result in other income
from rendering of service within the meaning of section 22 no 3 of the Income Tax Act. This
is the case – despite the marketing nature of many airdrops – if interested parties are required
to render a service (see paragraph 46), and hence in particular in the case of active
engagement such as referring to the airdrop or the project initiator in social media posts.
Taxpayers also engage in rendering of service within the meaning of section 22 no 3 of the
Income Tax Act if they upload images, photos or videos of their own to a platform and
receive units of virtual currency or other tokens in return, even if ownership of the images,
photos or videos remains with the taxpayer
If all you did is claim your tokens, there was no requirement on you to render a service or otherwise produce engagement. (The engagement we may have ultimately produced (including this thread) is “organic” and is not directly compensated.)
There is no expectation that you’d render some service in the future either. Quite the opposite; I would advocate anyone to not interact with this random shitcoin #45812 in any other way than to claim these tokens.
All the work I did to qualify was not done with the intent of qualifying for some shitcoin airdrop but for the benefit if Nixpkgs. I did not know about this shitcoin’s existence in the period that was used for qualifying.
74:
If there is no economic connection between the allocation of units of virtual currency or other
tokens and a rendering of service, then it may constitute a gift for which the tax rules on gifts
apply.
Gifts from strangers are tax free up to 20 000€, so this would be the desirable case as it’d mean not a single cent in taxes.
There was no direct relationship or compensation for the work we did or even any sort of expectation to be compensated when we did the work that qualified us.
However, it was still our work that qualified us which I guess could be seen as the rendering of a service? It’d also certainly be disingenuous to say that there was no “economic connection” at all as the rewards did scale with the number of our “contributions”. It’s just that we didn’t do these contributions for the purpose of receiving anything.