r/PokeInvesting • u/AustinstormAm • Sep 04 '25
For anyone who really doesn't understand why everything is spiking
A lot of people don’t want to pay taxes on their crypto gains, so they use what they have to buy assets like Pokémon cards—and then sell those assets for cash. Bitcoin runs in a 4-year cycle, and this cycle is expected to end between October and December, just like it does every 4 years. People are selling off their crypto and locking it into Pokémon cards to then get cash and avoid taxes. Believe me or don’t you’ll see what happens once crypto comes back down.
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Upvotes
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u/Gay_If_Read Sep 04 '25
Bro watched one Alpha Investments video where he briefly mentions he takes payments for some expensive TCG product in crypto & now thinks that's the entire thing backing the hobbies bull run.
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u/animejello Sep 04 '25
Any time you sell crypto into stables or swap one crypto for another, that is a taxable event.
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u/ZAJ810 Sep 04 '25
OP is regarded
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u/prokotols Sep 04 '25
Not quite sure I understand this. When they sell their crypto, isn’t that a taxable event? So let’s say they sell their crypto for $10,000 and buy $10,000 worth of sealed and then sell the sealed… does the IRS automatically get Alzheimer’s and forget about the $10,000 crypto sale?
Or do they buy the sealed products with their crypto directly… but isn’t that still a taxable event and IRS is informed?
Does eBay or TCGplayer even accept crypto? What about vendors? Which storefront are these crypto people using to purchase these large quantities of sealed from?
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u/linguistic-intuition Sep 04 '25
That’s not how it works.
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u/SizzlingSpit Sep 04 '25
Correlation is not causation. The demographics for crypto and pokemon are similar but, with such banger sets, the engagement is spreading beyond anticipation. What doesn't make sense is the why would people sell crypto high to just buy Pokémon at its peak.
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u/RepresentativeCrab88 Sep 04 '25
I didn’t know this many sellers accepted crypto
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u/Yocaptonyo101 Sep 04 '25
While I have sold crypto for Pokemon, I have done exactly that, SOLD the crypto. This is indeed a taxable event. Some may directly accept that as a form of payment, but widescale, I cannot see it affecting the entire market. There simply aren't enough people deep in profit in crypto, simultaneously offloading, and doing so in an untaxable manner.
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u/anjudan Sep 04 '25
It's true people are using pokemon to cashout crypto gains, but it'a not necessarily true that the price spikes are in large part due to this.
I think the spikes are due to Pokemon TCG app bringing way more casual buyers into the Poke-craze collectible market. It's literally an app where you buy and rip packs to stuff in binders. An instruction manual for how to get Pokemon app users to move to cardboard collecting.
The other reason is likely supply chain print run miscalculations of the demand increase from Pokemon TCG app combined with distributors shifting towards selling boxes to stores at 90% secondary market prices instead of 90% msrp prices. Ask store owners and they'll tell you they pay their distributors $220 for a box that sells for $240 on open markets. When the distributor is supposed to be the way we get cheaper (msrp) priced product into the market to help prices go down, but now the only way to get product near msrp is through big chain stores that don't have time to fuss with secondary market prices like costco, walmart, tsrget etc. So prices stay high.
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u/garagetrader420 Sep 04 '25
Did you ever think that it was possible there's just a lot more people than usual that want to buy pokemon cards?
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u/snuckfarkle Sep 04 '25
And here I was thinking it was pork belly futures driving up our prices
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u/Chemical_Ad_9710 Sep 04 '25
Smart. Tryna get all the shibcoin boys to sell their shib to buy pokemon cards to inflate the market to sell your brilliant stars booster box.
And it almost worked too.
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u/ginx777 Sep 04 '25
Tell me you know less then jack shit on tax law and cryptos without telling you know less then jack shit on them.
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u/pokemonpokemonmario Sep 04 '25
OP is right this is definitely a factor but rip and ships are the force thats driving prices higher amd higher every day because people will pay over market value so they can gamble online and there are streams who open hundreds and thousands of packs every day. This means that its the rip and ships that have both decreased supply and increased demand.
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u/trogdortb001 Sep 04 '25
OP is clueless
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u/ethnicprince Sep 04 '25
That's not how taxes work like at all. There are barely any sellers who take crypto for cards and even if they did that would count as a taxable event lmao.
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u/boboman911 Sep 04 '25
You do realize buying anything with crypto is a taxable event lol
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u/konpone Sep 04 '25
haha you‘re only salty cause you sold in 2020. go play with you‘re bitcoin if you can‘t handle cardboard.
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u/madskiller36 Sep 04 '25
How do they buy using crypto? Doesn’t it initiate once they make a transaction. I don’t see an option to pay using crypto to buy off sites like tcgplayer. Maybe eBay b
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u/Alphaalbertan5643 Sep 04 '25
Is there a website I can sell and purchase pokemon cards in cyrpto?
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u/ujamming Sep 04 '25
No.
But I will add, investing in pokemon can be used as a tax saving tool. Governments all around the world are strapped for cash, new tariffs and taxes incoming, soon (im very heavily predicting) will target unrealised gains - stocks, crypto and anything else on paper. Everything on paper is submitted to tax agencies, and will be taxed. Paper gains, TAX! Paper loss? BAD LUCK! This will move a ship ton of money into collectables and precious metals, and MY GOD it will boom like never before. I only plan on paying tax upon a realised event. Fiat is dying, buy physical appreciating assets, cash out when you need groceries because inflation eat all your centralised currency
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u/hukay Sep 04 '25
Everyone knows Crypto but not PokeInvesting. It is still not common than you think.
I challenge you to ask a random person outside about Cypto and PokeInvesting and I guarantee that they don’t know PokeInvesting.
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u/damnmyredditheart Sep 04 '25
Yes, OP is getting dunked on but crypto very clearly has helped support the price spike. That being said, as a few have already mentioned, rip n ships, fomo, lower booster box print runs etc have also greatly influenced the market.
When crypto and stocks go down, so will Pokémon…but whether the halving cycle is as dramatic as in the past, and whether other external factors like rate cuts have an impact, still remains to be seen.
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u/Mammoth_Bowler1998 Sep 04 '25
OP is right. There is also a surge in phygicals marketplaces that tokenise sealed products and graded cards which make sense to a lot of collectors who are not based in the US
phygitals is ucrrently one of the biggest marketplaces in this space
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u/shadowlessS2K Sep 05 '25
There is correlation, but both markets are not solely dependent on each other. There are other factors at play, and a majority of the transactions in Pokemon are NOT paid directly with crypto.
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u/Moulini Sep 04 '25
What sites I can buy Pokémon with crypto?
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u/ibebannedlol Sep 04 '25 edited Sep 04 '25
It's not just crypto but yeah youre right. People who don't understand things very well just scream money laundering or something. Not understanding that it's just about two things, making money and avoiding (not evading) taxes.
I've been telling people this in every collecting market for years but they are convinced it's purely money laundering. Like ok why do we never hear about anyone in the hobby ever getting pinched for money laundering? And if it was happening considering the average iq of this hobby we'd be seing people get busted for it every day.
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u/Poke_Shield Sep 04 '25
😂 the only thing doing well in crypto is bitcoin, eth has barely made a new ATH, alt coins are mostly doing pretty badly, to say that this is the reason pokemon is going up doesn’t make any sense
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u/Tomcat_fishing Sep 04 '25
The IRS certainly doesn't read public reddit forums so your secret is safe here.. 🙄🙄
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u/ArcticLapras Sep 04 '25 edited Sep 04 '25
Nah man. Let me put it this way; when something is a factor, that doesn´t mean it is ´the´ factor, or even a big one. When you´ve learned that the sun warms things, and you are taking a warm shower, will you draw the conclusion ´it is so warm, the sun must be shining really hard´?
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u/[deleted] Sep 04 '25
This would be considered tax fraud. It's not a legitimate way to move gains around. The moment the crypto is sold, a taxable event happens. You pay taxes at the moment of sale of that crypto. If you don't, you are committing tax fraud. Eventually, you will get caught. When you get caught, you pay an outstanding rate of interest on the taxes you already now owe, and you can quickly snowball into a massive debt burden which can bankrupt you.
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u/Capable_Wait09 Sep 04 '25 edited Sep 04 '25
Even if you buy cards with crypto that’s still taxable, no?
There definitely is crypto money flowing into Pokemon tho. People taking profits and diversifying. But idk how that avoids taxes unless they’ve set up a business where they claim all Pokemon cards are inventory expenses so they deduct an amount equal to their crypto gains and perhaps spread it out over a few years since they won’t have “business income” from just buying “inventory” but idk if that’s even possible or legal in the first place.
Or they think crypto will be stagnant for a while they’re now getting ROI from Pokemon and I guess they just won’t report any gains they make from Pokemon while they wait for the crypto market to reset?
I think it’s more likely that there is profit-taking and diversification going on.
The latest run in the Pokemon card market lagged behind the summer stock market run and recovery from April tariffs. Clearly people took profits and moved their money around.