So my accountant told me today...
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taken from http://www.journalofaccountancy.com/news/20149850.htm
The notice discusses the tax aspects of “mining†bitcoins, the process of obtaining bitcoins by solving complex mathematical problems. The IRS says that “when a taxpayer successfully ‘mines’ virtual currency, the fair market value of the virtual currency as of the date of receipt is includible in [the taxpayer’s] gross income.†If a taxpayer’s “mining†of virtual currency constitutes a trade or business, and the “mining†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)
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That sounds great, I busy testing new changes at the moment. have you checked out the API?
With doing the testnet - I’ve found you can poll the feathercoind as well - go into console type help tells you the commands.
We wrote that to a file to analyse later.I’ll be interested to read any further, how you get on…
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I was going to try and stick with websites that provide data. Its more about learning curve than anything. doing a get or post call is trivial and parsing json or csv is also pretty easy.
I found this site. https://coinplorer.com/ They use an ajax call to build the chart using javascript in the browser. I’ll use them to write a “catch up” function that will update missing price data on your client using their data. the actual call looks like this.
examples:
ftc
https://coinplorer.com/Charts/GetData?fromCurrency=FTC&toCurrency=USD&fromDate=null&toDate=null
btc
https://coinplorer.com/Charts/GetData?fromCurrency=BTC&toCurrency=USD&fromDate=null&toDate=null
ftc with date and time
ftc with date only
There is no particular reason I’m using them other than they are the first I found that does the job.
*edit* I should add, I might eventually make it use the feathercoin daemon if the info is all there, I just wanted to get this out the door sooner than later.
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I’m with ya, going to need to file for an extension at this rate. So a year from now, when the software for this type of tax info is as easy as a google search, expect the IRS to be coming after people.
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Why not extract the hourly or daily value of FTC from for example Cryptsy and store that in your own MySQL database ?
This way you can create your own ‘history’ and become independent from sites going down in the future.
Just figure you had setup your system based on MyGox only, you’ll have a problem now getting data from it…
I have a script running against Cryptsy and feeding data into my own MySQL if you need some samples.
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Really cause its more work. This is something I can make in a few minutes that gets the job done without any bells or whistlse. trying to deploy a database with the program is so much more than I was going to do.
if you already have a program scraping the data from cryptsy daily. you wouldnt really need this. you would just import the export data and do a sql join to get the results you need.
