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Want to know what’s even more fun? Since 2018 if you have income from a hobby you are not allowed to deduct any expenses from it, but do need to pay taxes on any income. So if you make a bit of money from photography, and buy and sell a bunch of camera gear, you you taxes on all the camera gear you sold even if it’s sold at a loss.

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Wait this seems totally logical. Imagine if you could deduct the cost of your car because you used it to drive to a photography shoot once. Or deduct the cost of your personal laptop because you used it for photo editing.

This is basically the separation that sole proprietorships have to go through. Stuff that is exclusively used for your business is deductible, anything for personal use isn't.

> Stuff that is exclusively used for your business is deductible, anything for personal use isn't.

I think you're working from a different set of assumptions than GP. They were specifically contending that exclusive expenses could not be deducted, even if the overall net value of transactions is negative (because it's not a business, but just a partial recovery of hobby expenditures.)

It’s more like having to pay taxes on the money you get when you sell your car even though you sold it for less than you paid.

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