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Launch HN: CoinTracker (YC W18) – Cryptocurrency portfolio and tax manager

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Launch HN: CoinTracker (YC W18) – Cryptocurrency portfolio and tax manager

#1
Hi — we’re Chandan and Jon, co-founders of CoinTracker (https://www.cointracker.io). CoinTracker is a cryptocurrency portfolio manager that automatically pulls balances and transactions from top exchanges and wallets, and delivers tax information to users.

We built CoinTracker because, as cryptocurrency investors, we were let down by the existing tools for basic performance tracking of our investments. We started by simply creating a spreadsheet that enabled manual entry of transactions, and eventually hacked away with Google Apps scripts to import prices from various exchanges. This quickly got out of hand, so we built our own tool. We casually told a few friends who are into cryptocurrency about it. They found it as useful as we did, and to our surprise started telling their friends about it. We started receiving a steady stream of feature requests, and since then we have been steadily improving CoinTracker.

One of CoinTracker’s foundational aspects is that balances and transactions are automatically synced from exchanges and cryptocurrency wallets. Before CoinTracker, we hated the idea of manually entering every transaction into a tool. This approach also enables us to calculate cost basis, ROI, capital gains, and other tax-related information for you. There are technical challenges of ensuring that we correctly handle transfers between your wallets and transitively handle cost basis — something that a lot of other tools struggle to do correctly. We think this direction is enabling us to build the best cryptocurrency portfolio tracker with important services like taxes built on top.

We'd love to get feedback from the HN community on CoinTracker and how we can improve. Thank you!

Re: Launch HN: CoinTracker (YC W18) – Cryptocurrency portfolio and tax manager

#2
There are no cryptocurrency investors, because cryptocurrencies are not an investment, they are speculation.

You have started a company to help people lose money.

In the future, kindly use your enthusiasm and skills for something more useful.

Re: Launch HN: CoinTracker (YC W18) – Cryptocurrency portfolio and tax manager

#3
post #2

There are no cryptocurrency investors, because cryptocurrencies are not an investment, they are speculation. You have started a company to help people lose money. In the future, kindly use your enthusiasm and skills for something more useful.

You may be right — the difference between investing and speculation is a fine line and buying and trading cryptocurrency is definitely risky business. We certainly don't deny that.

Some pretty interesting industries have gotten bootstrapped with speculation though, and we are hopeful that more practical applications will develop in the future.

Re: Launch HN: CoinTracker (YC W18) – Cryptocurrency portfolio and tax manager

#4
How much of the motivation behind this service is to aggregate private crypto market data, and how much of it is to provide a great user experience? Please offer a response to this in a percentage format with supporting justification. Thank you.

Re: Launch HN: CoinTracker (YC W18) – Cryptocurrency portfolio and tax manager

#5
post #2

There are no cryptocurrency investors, because cryptocurrencies are not an investment, they are speculation. You have started a company to help people lose money. In the future, kindly use your enthusiasm and skills for something more useful.

You may be right — the difference between investing and speculation is a fine line and buying and trading cryptocurrency is definitely risky business. We certainly don't deny that. Some pretty interesting industries have gotten bootstrapped with speculation though, and we are hopeful that more practical applications will develop in the future.

Trains got bootstrapped with speculation... but they were clearly useful before the speculation.

Same for the Internet.

As you admit yourself, cryptocurrencies are a solution looking for a problem. They do nothing, they provide nothing, they're just—"valuable". It's a scam, thousands of people will lose money, and you will have done your part to help those people lose money.

Re: Launch HN: CoinTracker (YC W18) – Cryptocurrency portfolio and tax manager

#6
I'm a blockchain investor at [redacted] if you want to talk more. Initial thoughts:

-A solution in your space is badly needed. Fund administrators really need an option that is better than cointracking.info and coinigy. A lot of these folks are looking at partnering with Libra here in the near future.

-your offering as is, is too limited. anyone investing seriously in the space owns a lot more than than the 4 coins available in your wallet option.

-Most could probably get by with the exchanges you have listed so that's a a good thing

I know you're just getting started, so I'm excited to see how your offering progresses. Good luck, and happy to talk more offline. Would also be interested in investing. Thanks.

Re: Launch HN: CoinTracker (YC W18) – Cryptocurrency portfolio and tax manager

#7
post #2

There are no cryptocurrency investors, because cryptocurrencies are not an investment, they are speculation. You have started a company to help people lose money. In the future, kindly use your enthusiasm and skills for something more useful.

^this comment is not helpful

Re: Launch HN: CoinTracker (YC W18) – Cryptocurrency portfolio and tax manager

#8
post #2

There are no cryptocurrency investors, because cryptocurrencies are not an investment, they are speculation. You have started a company to help people lose money. In the future, kindly use your enthusiasm and skills for something more useful.

This is a shockingly dismissive comment for the space.

I understand that cryptocurrencies are a divisive topic, particularly on HN. Dismissing the hard work of a startup showing off what i believe to be a well-executed marketing page and tool is not only shortsighted, but goes against the very philosophies of Hacker News in general.

Re: Launch HN: CoinTracker (YC W18) – Cryptocurrency portfolio and tax manager

#10

How much of the motivation behind this service is to aggregate private crypto market data, and how much of it is to provide a great user experience? Please offer a response to this in a percentage format with supporting justification. Thank you.

It's a fair question! It may sound ridiculous, but we are 100% motivated by improving UX in the crypto space, and not interested in building a business around aggregating and selling/trading on private crypto market data. This is core to our mission and built into our policies (https://www.cointracker.io/security) and commitments that we will never sell user data.

In fact both Jon and I have backgrounds working on consumer-facing products at Google, and the huge pain point around UX in the cryptocurrency space is largely what drew us away from Google and into CoinTracker.

If we were interesting in monetizing user trade data, we would either build a cryptocurrency hedge fund or partner with those types of investing institutions. We explicitly haven't done that and are committed to not doing so.

Instead we have taken the route of building user-friendly consumer tools (starting with tax), with the hope that making the space slightly more accessible will help push the whole space forward.

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