Tax Issues facing US-based Cryptocurrency Holders and Miners: Part 1 Capital Gains/Losses for Crypto

Quick summary of capital gain/loss taxation and accounting challenges for crypto traders

The IRS wants you to account for cryptocurrency as property. This means that if someone pays you in crypto, you're expected to declare it as income at the value it had at the time you receive it. If you trade it for money or some other form of property, you are required to report any capital gain or loss associated with that trade. As a simple case, if you bought a Bitcoin for $300 and later sold it for $400, you would report a gain of $100. Vice versa, you can also report losses on your trade which can be used to counterbalance gains you've had during that tax period.

But unfortunately for tax payers, tax accounting for gains and losses are not symmetrical. If you gain $10K during your first year of trading, you have to pay taxes on the total amount. If you lose $10K during that time, you can only deduct up to a fixed amount (limit has been $3K for many years now) and must carryover any additional losses to offset potential gains in future tax years (or take another $3K deduction each year if you have no gains in any given future year). It's also possible to carryback the loss to a prior year where you had gains (assuming you're willing to file an amendment to your prior year's tax form).

All of the above accounting is a bit of a pain, as you might imagine or perhaps have experienced, but many people successfully file tax returns every year with capital gains and losses (and at least a decent portion of them are probably filed correctly).

Crypto-specific Accounting Challenges

But gains/losses in cryptocurrency can be much more difficult to account for compared to trading in traditional securities, primarily because many cryptocurrency exchanges don't offer adequate tax calculators like those that are typically found on traditional stock exchanges. There are no doubt many reasons for this: US traders often find themselves trading on foreign exchanges with different tax laws, many crypto exchanges are relatively new and don't have the resources to easily develop such software themselves, and few if any prepackaged solutions exist for them to purchase and license for use by their customers. By contrast, one of the primary options exchanges I've used, OptionsHouse, has a very sophisticated calculator that they license that will compute my entire gain or loss for a year, automatically optimizing for minimal tax consequences.

Another problem is that many cryptocurrency trades are made between two different cryptocurrencies instead of having a common "base" currency of US dollars like traditional stock exchanges do. While it's not difficult to account for a gain or loss when buying or selling crypto with US dollars, it's more of a pain to record US dollar-equivalent values for every trade you make between two cryptocurrency pairs (e.g. buying STEEM with Bitcoin). Given the volatility of crypto pricing and the lack of automating recording of a USD-equivalent value at the time of the trade, I think most US tax payers can at best get an approximate USD value at some time near to the time of their trade.

But because it is so difficult to do right now, especially if you're making frequent trades, I don't think this is an area traders can expect the IRS to come down hard on right now. I don't believe the IRS itself has the resources to assess completely accurate compliance currently or the potential profit for them to develop those resources yet. So my personal belief is that a good-faith attempt at determining a reasonable price will satisfy the IRS at the current time.

In part 2 of this series, I'll discuss tax implications of mining cryptocurrency in general, and STEEM in particular.