There have been many articles on Bitcoin Forks. The most notorious is the one from Forbes:
This article is flawed in many ways, but in particular is the notion that whenever someone gives you something with a perceived wealth (but not proven) wealth you need to immediately take this as income. Besides the fact that there are scam forks (like Bitcoin Gold), I don't see how it's viable to treat this as income. I think Forbes is misleading it's readers by simply calling it out as income. A variety of cases:
You are given a virtual asset that no one tells you about. You do not know about it, or know even if you do know how to obtain it. Further, obtaining it may compromise your security, or that of other assets. How do you trust this virtual asset?
You are given a virtual asset that you don't trust, has a questionable value on XXX (scam exchange). How do you trust this exchange?
Imagine the case where someone generates a virtual digital image based on a photo they saw of you. They encrypt it, and then email the encrypted image to a public board saying only you can access this image. They create several CDs and send them out, including your home address to decrypt the image. Meanwhile on a trading site someone says that this decrypted image of you is worth $1M. People start trading for this image. You don't trust the person involved, or the CD so have no intention to "trade it". Are you then stuck with $1M of income? This makes no financial sense whatsoever. I could imagine thousands of cases where people can virtualize assets, and give it to you. If you've shown no intent to access/sell this asset how can it ever be declared as income!?
I found other links on this topic that may be of interest to people:
For income:
https://www.bitcointaxsolutions.com/yes-bitcoin-hardford-is-taxable-income-heres-why/
https://bitcoin.tax/blog/how-to-tax-bitcoin-cash-bch/
Against income:
https://jvltax.com/239/bitcoin-hard-fork-taxable-income/
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:lbHLjAUiWoYJ:https://jvltax.com/239/bitcoin-hard-fork-taxable-income/+&cd=4&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us
Both sides income vs. not:
https://jvltax.com/239/bitcoin-hard-fork-taxable-income/
https://www.investopedia.com/news/bitcoins-biggest-unresolved-tax-question-hard-forks/
Lastly, a Reddit site with some comments on hard forks:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16213362#16214203
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Last comment is that I hope governments provide guidance on this soon. This situation could easily be manipulated by bad players to abuse the crypto market, or/and simply steal coins from legitimate coin holders.