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What are you saying? My brokerage account has to tell the IRS how much money I made selling stocks. Sometimes I find that information out by referring to the documents which they send to the IRS, ffs!

Why is this any different at all?

If you already paid taxes on them, you can demonstrate that pretty easily.

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Because with traditional custodial assets there is a system in which there are verifiable records of ownership from which cost basis can be extracted, and a method for porting this information from custodian to custodian when assets are moved between brokerages. None of that exists for bitcoin, rather by design, as bitcoin resembles more of a bearer instrument than a traditional asset. Except in the simplest case where you buy coins from a single exchange, leave them on that exchange for the entire time you hold them (against all best practices), and then sell on that same exchange, there is absolutely no way for the exchange to know what your cost basis was, whether it was short term or long term capital gains, etc.

Are currency trades taxed? I think bitcoin should fall more into that category.

Trades are not taxed in either case. Capital gains are, for both bitcoin and forex.

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