I remember talking about this matter at Steemfest with you. big deal indeed. thank you for bringing it up. the burden is on us as individuals, at least in the US, and everyone should pay taxes on profits unless you are in a jurisdiction where you don't need to (e.g. "tax safe heaven").
In the US, you can use the same methodology used to account for stock gains. Hold more than a year, it's long term cap gains. Hold for less you pay short term cap gains. Trading one coin for another creates a taxable event. Keep records and give them to a CPA.
One of the major big picture things I post about is mass adoption for the technology and more generally the new business models it allows. If the pioneers do not pay attention to basic things such as paying taxes, we will have an uphill battle scaling. Such battle will be far more detrimental in the long run than doing the right from the start. For Steemit it is gaining market share on the internet, basically competing with Reddit, Medium, news site, Insta, etc. Most of these huge corporation pay little tax cause they had teams of tax attorneys behind them. Corporations make the money, can hire talent to optimize their corporate structure for the profit of the shareholders. Not problem there at all. Here, since the user is the one getting the revenue, it is up to the user to properly structure themselves. Absent a team of tax counsels, you have to pay taxes. If we go further down this path, one could argue that Steemit is better for the tax man than people using other sites. Thoughts on this anyone?
On the other hand, if content producers using Steemit pay taxes, uncle Sam will likely be happy and not interfere with the growth. remember that, anyone can query the public chain and see who got what and when.