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

news.ycombinator.com

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

#51

Post by nicpottier »

chanfest22 wrote: post #37
nicpottier wrote: post #29

I plugged in Coinbase out of curiosity as I do need to figure out some taxes here. I don't understand how these calculations are being done however. Seems to be taking cryptocurrency transfers as "selling" events, even though I was just moving to a non-coinbase account. This basically makes this useless for me to track my capital gains. Am I missing something?

You're right — if you move coins to a non-tracked wallet we treat this as if you used those coins to buy something because we really don't know. If you connect the wallet/exchange that the outgoing transfer went to, we will automatically pair them up and the gains will be calculated correctly. Does that make sense?

Given how many people use offline wallets (in my case a paper wallet as well as a Trezor) seems like you need some way to let me mark transactions as "non sell" and "non buy" otherwise this really doesn't provide me much value.

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

#52

Post by hodl »

itamarst wrote: post #5
chanfest22 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Solutions looking for a problem are OK and are a healthy part of the economy.

In countries that have problems with their fiat currency, non government controlled currencies are quite useful. Especially as crypto cannot be confiscated.

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

#54

Post by PKop »

chanfest22 wrote: post #37
nicpottier wrote: post #29

I plugged in Coinbase out of curiosity as I do need to figure out some taxes here. I don't understand how these calculations are being done however. Seems to be taking cryptocurrency transfers as "selling" events, even though I was just moving to a non-coinbase account. This basically makes this useless for me to track my capital gains. Am I missing something?

You're right — if you move coins to a non-tracked wallet we treat this as if you used those coins to buy something because we really don't know. If you connect the wallet/exchange that the outgoing transfer went to, we will automatically pair them up and the gains will be calculated correctly. Does that make sense?

Is there a section within the transaction list that makes this explicit? I'm confused..

I'm seeing "Sent to bitcoin address" for some external transactions to private wallet, but don't see a realized gain.

Just want to be clear: is my final tax amount tainted by not including any external wallets that I've transferred ALL of my purchased bitcoin to? I only added coinbase and bittrex.. I need to add my wallets also?

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

#55

Post by flowctrl »

The USA is taxing every trade. In Canada (according to my accountant, at least), cryptocurrency gains are only taxable when "realized" by selling into fiat (capital gains), or spending on goods and services (income). Until that point, they are considered intangible assets and not subject to tax. A USA/non-USA (or taxable trades vs only fiat trades) switch feature would be nice, to account for the different approach to taxation.

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

#56

Post by chanfest22 »

nicpottier wrote: post #51
chanfest22 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right — if you move coins to a non-tracked wallet we treat this as if you used those coins to buy something because we really don't know. If you connect the wallet/exchange that the outgoing transfer went to, we will automatically pair them up and the gains will be calculated correctly. Does that make sense?

Given how many people use offline wallets (in my case a paper wallet as well as a Trezor) seems like you need some way to let me mark transactions as "non sell" and "non buy" otherwise this really doesn't provide me much value.

You're right — we need to improve this. In the mean time, we allow users to track their offline/paper/hardware wallet addresses: www.cointracker.io/add_wallet so that those transfers are accounted for (currently have to add one address at a time)

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

#57

Post by chanfest22 »

dharma1 wrote: post #53

Cool. How does the read-only access work?

For Coinbase we request the Read Permission from Coinbase Connect (OAuth2 flow). For the rest of the exchanges we request the user to add their API keys with restrictions for view only access (enforced by the exchanges). The instructions are listed for each exchange when you add them from the wallets page: www.cointracker.io/wallets

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

#58

Post by chanfest22 »

PKop wrote: post #54
chanfest22 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right — if you move coins to a non-tracked wallet we treat this as if you used those coins to buy something because we really don't know. If you connect the wallet/exchange that the outgoing transfer went to, we will automatically pair them up and the gains will be calculated correctly. Does that make sense?

Is there a section within the transaction list that makes this explicit? I'm confused.. I'm seeing "Sent to bitcoin address" for some external transactions to private wallet, but don't see a realized gain. Just want to be clear: is my final tax amount tainted by not including any external wallets that I've transferred ALL of my purchased bitcoin to? I only added coinbase and bittrex.. I need to add my wallets also?

Yes, you'll need to add your full crypto trading history (e.g. fiat ---> crypto ---> crypto ---> fiat) across all wallets and exchanges in order to get accurate tax information. We have more information about how and why here:

www.cointracker.io/faq#section-cost-basis www.cointracker.io/faq#section-tax

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

#59

Post by meritt »

treepunch wrote: post #35

Also just signed up with the Lite plan to play around with it. I'm in that scary spot where I have about 1200 transactions in the last year (small value bot trading) where I would gladly pay $150 for the tax report but $1000 dollars is pushing it. Also I'm sure this is just a function of high traffic from posting, but I am getting a significant amount of application errors for almost all actions taken on the site. Re…

Yeah the pricing is absurd. It should be related to capital gains and not simply the amount of transactions. I have a very large number of transactions (algorithmic trading) with a tiny profit.

At this point just going to write a simple script to generate the 8949 from the exchange myself.

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

#60

Post by lettergram »

If you're looking for investment advice, news updates, expert opinion tracking, etc.

(Essentially everything that doesn't touch money directly). I built a platform: https://projectpiglet.com/

Speaking of which, if anyone from the CoinTracker team is interested - I never want to touch money, so I don't feel we are competitors. I'd be happy to work with you to provide a "news feed" feature, and a lot of additional analytics (obviously, we'd work something out).

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