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Comment by thefreeman | Hacker News Reader

Are exchanges going to provide us with necessary tax documents in order to pay these taxes? So far all I've found is a terrible csv export that shows the date and amount of purchases of various crypto currencies, but no information at all on the current price at the time of purchase or the amount sold for (this is on Coinbase). I'm starting to get a bit concerned.

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I'm planning to use either cointracking.info or bitcoin.tax - they accept these exports, and use their own feeds for determining cost basis at purchase time.

Overall I've been pretty dissappointed by the recommendations put out by the IRS - I ended up having to talk to pay to talk to a tax advisor due to the conflicting advice on the internet.

I tried cointracking.info a couple of months back and figured that it would take some time for it to stablize. With different exhanges using different formats, and no support for all exchanges (at least the ones I am using), it is tough to tally. I finally used their export as basis and built my own excel sheet. I don’t think I have it all figured but I am happy with what I have. Now whenever I make any transaction, I add entries to my sheet.

Awesome, thanks for those. I had no idea these resources existed.

I purchased $300 BTC the other day on CB and they wanted a $30 transaction fee to withdraw the BTC off their site. I wonder if this fee can also be considered part of the purchase?

Just FYI, coinbase is paired with GDAX, their exchange.

You can transfer your bitcoin to GDAX and withdraw it from there for free (they will eat the bitcoin fees)

That amount sounds suspiciously less like a CB fee and more like the network transaction fee to ensure your transaction winds up in the next block. The average is $41.69 as of this morning.

https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactionfees...

I believe this fee can be figured into the cost basis.

In the future when you are withdrawing from coinbase, you can transfer to gdax (their exchange platform) instantly, for free, and then transfer out to your wallet for free.

Does the IRS allow brokerage fees to be deducted?

Brokerage fees, margin interest, anything related to making those capital gains the government is taxing is deductible. I am not an accountant nor anyone you should be taking tax advice from.

Technically there are graphs that recorded the history of price at any point in time. So you could fill your taxes even with that poor csv Coinbase gives. Now 100% aboard with you, exchanges need to get on it and deliver us some workable tax documents. It's already enough of a pain as it is now, no need to make my tax season any worse!

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