Does #EUVAT make accepting bitcoins impossible for EU-based digital services businesses?

Earlier on today I blogged a description of what we had to do at PythonAnywhere to handle the upcoming EU VAT (~= sales tax) changes for digital services . It's a long post (though I tried to keep it as light as possible), but the short form is "it was hard, and at least in part unnecessarily so".

In a comment, Hristo suggested a workaround: "Enter Bitcoin".

It's possible they meant "and ignore the tax authorities entirely", but let's consider the impact on businesses that want to play by the rules. I think Bitcoin could be worse than credit card billing. In fact, if I'm reading the regulations right (and I might not be, I was up at 5am for a deployment today), the EU VAT changes might make accepting bitcoins pretty much impossible for law-abiding online EU businesses selling digital services like hosting, music downloads, and ebooks.

Here's why:

Under the new rules, we need two pieces of non-conflicting evidence as to a customer's location. The IP address can be one of them, and for our credit card/PayPal customers we can use their billing address as another.

But for Bitcoin, there is no billing address -- it's essentially digital cash. And regarding the other kinds of acceptable evidence:

• "location of the bank" -- not applicable using Bitcoin.
• "the country code of SIM card used by the customer" -- not available for an ordinary Internet business.
• "the location of the customer's fixed land line through which the service is supplied to him" -- not available for an ordinary Internet business.
• "other commercially relevant information (for example, product coding information which electronically links the sale to a particular jurisdiction)" -- not applicable for a standardised product. Possibly usable if you're selling SaaS tax-filing or something else that's entirely country-specific.

Now, perhaps that list is non-exhaustive. It's hard to tell whether it is because it says we must "obtain and to keep in your records 2 pieces of non-contradictory evidence from the following list", which implies that it's an exhaustive list, but then says "Examples include", which implies that it's not. [UPDATE: they've updated the guidance, it's definitely non-exhaustive] But even if it is non-exhaustive, and, say, you can use a scan of someone's utility bill or other stuff like the proof of address stuff you need to provide when you start a bank account, I can't think of anything that anyone would be likely to be willing to provide for digital services like web hosting, music, or ebooks.

All of this means that, at least from my reading of the rules, we cannot now accept bitcoins as a means of payment. I've asked our accountants their professional opinion. But I'm not holding out much hope.

What do you think? Am I missing something -- perhaps some kind of other proof of location that an online business accepting Bitcoin could easily gather?

Or is Bitcoin now effectively sunk as a means of payment for digital goods sold by businesses in the EU?

Generating political news using NLTK

It's election week here in the UK; on Thursday, we'll be going to the polls to choose our next government. At Resolver Systems, thanks to energy and inventiveness of our PR guys over at Chameleon, we've been doing a bunch of things related to this, including some analysis for the New Statesman that required us to index vast quantities of tweets and newspaper articles.

Last week I was looking at the results of this indexing, and was reminded of the fun I had playing with NLTK back in February. NLTK is the Python Natural Language Toolkit; as you'd expect, it has a lot of clever stuff for parsing and interpreting text. More unexpectedly (at least for me), it has the ability to take some input text, analyse it, and then generate more text in the same style. Here's something based on the Book of Genesis:

In the selfsame day entered Noah , and asses , flocks , and Maachah . And Joseph said unto him , Abrah and he asses , and told all these things are against me . And Jacob told Rachel that he hearkened not unto you . And Sarah said , I had seen the face of the air ; for he hath broken my covenant between God and every thing that creepeth upon the man : And Eber lived after he begat Salah four hundred and thirty years , and took of every sort shalt thou be come thither .

It was the work of a moment to knock together some code that would read in all of the newspaper articles that we'd tagged as being about a particular subject, run them through a Beautiful Soup-based parser to pull out the article text, and feed that into NLTK, then to dump the results into a Wordpress blog (after a little manual polishing for readability).

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Joining TheyWorkForYou to Twitter

I'm putting together some spreadsheets that we're going to use to publicise Resolver One over the coming UK electoral campaign, and one set of data I needed was a list of Members of Parliaments' Twitter accounts indexed by an ID that I could use with TheyWorkForYou.com. I was delighted to discover Tweetminster, a site analysing MPs' tweets, and in particular their Twitter list of all UK MPs' accounts, but there was no link to TWFY.

So, given that no-one else seems to have done it, here's my own list:

• A Resolver One file listing Twitter accounts for TheyWorkForYou person_ids
• For those of you unlucky enough to not have a copy of Resolver One, here's a CSV file with exactly the same data.

Hope someone finds it useful. It's up-to-date as of this posting, and I'll endeavour to keep it up-to-date, at least for as long as we need it at work :-)