Hacker News Reader

Comment by tadruj | Hacker News Reader

I like the site, because they are the only ones who didn't launch just a landing page full of promises, but they actually calculate how much I owe to Uncle Sam.

View on HN

Sorry, but this looks exactly like a landing page full of promises unless you enter your Coinbase credentials. This is fallacious because Coinbase is not the only place where bitcoins will be stored.

Without giving up your Coinbase credentials, I was redirected to an email harvesting page to be on their invite list.

Maybe they changed the landing page since you last accessed it and removed that functionality?

Yes, the service currently works only for those with Coinbase accounts. We do not promise anything else at this time. I'd appreciate if you suggest which services should be added next.

I appreciate the difficulty of integrating with other services. It seems that the critical piece of information is figuring out a person's bitcoin buy/sell history based on the FIFO methodology as per IRS guidelines which you do a great job of clearly explaining in your FAQ.

I believe exchanges provide a means for downloading your personal transaction history, typically in CSV format. Thus, it would be great to be able to import/upload transaction histories for US bittax calculations.

This may boost exposure of your service since people could experience your core service functionality without exposing their broker/exchange credentials.

EDIT: If you're going to ask for credentials as the only way to access your service then you may want to also consider other popular wallet services or exchanges such as Blockchain.info, Bitstamp, BTC-E and/or Bitfinex. You may already be working on integrating your service with these suggestions, but I didn't see that listed on your site beyond the "this is an MVP" section and the October 15, 2014 date listed in the FAQ.

This is exactly what BitcoinTaxes provides https://bitcointaxes.info/

Thanks for the alternative. Looks much more fleshed out and feature complete.

Thank you for the detailed feedback. Yes, most of the exchanges allow to download one's personal transaction history. That does make CSV the next must-have functionality.

The challenge for us is not to loose simplicity. It is very easy to end up having bloatware as the result of implementing all of the IRS guidelines. So, we will take a careful one step at a time.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com