Shoutout to acidburn for the honest. "I'm in it to make money". Nothing wrong with that.
Some things to consider when talking about "transparency" on the blockchain. The transactions are public, but that's as far as it goes. You can log into Heritage Auction and view all the results...but you don't know who the buyer actually is. Back when the Banksy hype was going on in 2020, I think I was watching Forum Auctions and saw two user IDs buy up 90% of an auction. It was obvious the market was being manipulated when you see behavior like that. Taglitellia Gallery in NY did something similar with Invader a few years back.
Some accounts have crypto that they cannot ever convert to fiat for legal/illegal reasons, it costs them nothing to keep rolling the virtual money into NFTs and pumping things up. I did something similar a decade ago with king.com and gambling from an IP in New Jersey, but I lived in Florida and could never actually legally transfer the money to my bank...so I just kept rolling it back into tournaments and winning.
Anyone can have multiple wallets and transact between them, costing them only transaction fees while increasing the floor price.
I've seen accounts sell for less than half of what they paid for something. And that's calculating the actual USD equivalent How does that make sense?
If you want actual example of a suspect account, this one is constantly moving over a Currency from Heni and selling it, converting it to DAI, and doing the same thing again:
https://opensea.io/HAL_9000?tab=activity
And regarding taxes, the $600 transaction ceiling is bullshit and really only hurts low income individuals. The previous ceiling was $10,000.
If the crypto tax goes into the effect in 2023, it wouldn't be surprising at all to see everything come crashing down at the end of 2022. Some places like Coinbase I believe already issue 1099-MISC (correct me if I'm wrong here).