Source
r/CryptoCurrency•
chasingpace

Tax Question: Cost Basis? (Everyone probably needs these answers)

POLITICS

I'm working on a spreadsheet to calculate cost basis for each of my trades (holy cow this is a PIA). However, I'm new to this and have 2 main questions:

  1. Is my taxable gains equivalent too my Total Buys - Total Sells?

  2. What happens (hypothetically) if I purchase $1,000 worth of BTC, never sell it, and it never increases in value. According to what I've read it would have a cost basis of $1,000 + Fee, which would be summed in the "Total Buy" column and taxed. But that makes no sense. Does the initial buy have no cost basis?

Posted Jan 6, 2018, 1:01 AM UTC

16
dreamlucky•

Try bitcoin.tax, it’s free for so many trades and only like $20 a year to fully unlock, if anything it can get you started.

  1. Sells - Buys = gain

  2. Only the gain of #1 is taxed in most local.

3
chasingpaceOP•

I checked it out, but looks like you have to tie in your exchange accounts, which kind of scares me (if I read it right).

1
dreamlucky•

Or just export/import CSVs, there maybe a couple exceptions (gdax) you could sill manually enter the orders in if you don’t want to mess with APIs

2
LumpyyyyyObserver•

I know I'm a few days behind but do you know how they calculate cost-basis?

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dalilewok> 1 year account age. < 700 comment karma.•

You only get taxed on the difference between your sell price and buy price. Assuming this number is positive. If it’s negative then it can decrease your taxes. You also need to remember that depending on the length of holding the rate of tax is different. Less than a year is a short term holding and is taxed as regular income. Long term holdings longer than a year is capital gains tax.

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[deleted]•

[removed]

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