taken from http://www.journalofaccountancy.com/news/20149850.htm

The notice discusses the tax aspects of â€œminingâ€ bitcoins, the process of obtaining bitcoins by solving complex mathematical problems. The IRS says that â€œwhen a taxpayer successfully â€˜minesâ€™ virtual currency, the fair market value of the virtual currency as of the date of receipt is includible in [the taxpayerâ€™s] gross income.â€ If a taxpayerâ€™s â€œminingâ€ of virtual currency constitutes a trade or business, and the â€œminingâ€ activity is not undertaken by the taxpayer as an employee, the net earnings from self-employment (generally, gross income derived from carrying on a trade or business less allowable deductions) resulting from those activities constitute self-employment income and are subject to self-employment tax.

I mine feathercoins, and am essentially running it as a business in that I'm trying to deduct hardware costs and power usage. and amortizing costs over years etc. So this is relevant to me as the moment I get a block (or a payout from a pool) the coins are considered income equal to their current fair market value (in terms of gross income). Granted once you have the coins any gains or losses on said coins are capital gains, but that initial payout is considered normal income.

How do you calculate that easily? I mean most people get paid out very regularly so it can be a pain to calculate and your income since it is based on when you are getting the coins. My plan is to write a program this weekend that can take in the wallet transaction export and match it up with the daily market value of feathercoins. This leads me to my question for you all. is there a good place to get that (the daily market value of feather coins)? I was looking at the APIs of a couple diferent exchanges but nothing screamed "use me". Ideally I would be able to query a date range and get the data. I figured I'd include some simple csv text file that has the data in it with the excutable so it doesnt have to go anywhere, but I wanted to make the program be able to fetch new data if you told it to do so (to catch up what might not be included).

I could always host a service that allows people to query it from one of my websites but frankly I dont want the traffic (or the responsibility for keeping the data accurate). anyways anyone know where I can find such a nice api?

(yes. when I have the program done. I'll put it up on git hub for all to have, use and modify under an mit license. but this is going to be a pretty simple program. So, ya know, don't expect much)