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Yes, it gets complicated and takes diligence to keep accurate records. It will be interesting to hear audit stories. Fortunately, unlike conventional financial

Yes, it gets complicated and takes diligence to keep accurate records. It will be interesting to hear audit stories. Fortunately, unlike conventional financial institutions, crypto exchanges often provide APIs to help customers automate these things. Here is GDAX's reporting endpoint, for example: https://docs.gdax.com/#reports https://docs.gdax.com/#reports.

mancerayder 9y ago
An API for a customer? Sure, I could wrote code to automate a reporting of my exchange trades, but why couldn't the developers of the trading platform write their own automation to show me a line-by-line order history with the gains and losses itemized? It sure is something you will have with any other non-altcoin-trading platform.
- yebyen 9y ago
  You could pay these guys $20 per tax year: https://bitcoin.tax https://bitcoin.tax I think that, CoinBase and GDAX are not in the business of helping you file your tax returns. They may even incur liabilities if they helped you do it wrong. If coin trading platforms at-large are not solving this problem, then CoinBase has no need to compete on that point. There aren't any markets that try to help you file your taxes better, they are all busy solving the problems of holding cryptocurrency securely and making sure that trades are executed and accounted for reliably and in a timely fashion. This is not the only company that suggests API use for a customer. I was somewhat bewildered when I asked Pivotal if there was any more convenient interface to Story Tasks, and told Pivotal that I was writing a client for their API because it was too onerous to make sense of Project/Story/Task workflow through their application's interface, and they responded (in brief) "that's actually exactly what we'd recommend, good luck!" If they help you get a spreadsheet, you're going to blame them when it's too confusing for you (or your accountant) to distill into the form of a tax return correctly. What do you do with cancelled trades? How do you make sure they are discarded? (They should probably reflect on the data sheet somehow, right?) And what do you do when you trade on more than one market, or when you bring cryptocurrency from another source that already has a cost basis? Your itemized gains and losses are now incorrect, unless you provide an interface to express that cost basis into the system. And now you aren't just a market, you're an accounting platform. This sounds more and more like a problem for bitcoin.tax to solve, and not Coinbase. An API is the way to provide an interface to the data that is stored in your service (for customers, or anyone else.) The data that is not inside of your service, you don't need to take responsibility for as a service provider. As an API or service provider, there is an opportunity to answer these kinds of questions insofar as you feel responsible, in the interface documentation.

mancerayder 9y ago

An API for a customer? Sure, I could wrote code to automate a reporting of my exchange trades, but why couldn't the developers of the trading platform write their own automation to show me a line-by-line order history with the gains and losses itemized? It sure is something you will have with any other non-altcoin-trading platform.

yebyen 9y ago
You could pay these guys $20 per tax year: https://bitcoin.tax https://bitcoin.tax I think that, CoinBase and GDAX are not in the business of helping you file your tax returns. They may even incur liabilities if they helped you do it wrong. If coin trading platforms at-large are not solving this problem, then CoinBase has no need to compete on that point. There aren't any markets that try to help you file your taxes better, they are all busy solving the problems of holding cryptocurrency securely and making sure that trades are executed and accounted for reliably and in a timely fashion. This is not the only company that suggests API use for a customer. I was somewhat bewildered when I asked Pivotal if there was any more convenient interface to Story Tasks, and told Pivotal that I was writing a client for their API because it was too onerous to make sense of Project/Story/Task workflow through their application's interface, and they responded (in brief) "that's actually exactly what we'd recommend, good luck!" If they help you get a spreadsheet, you're going to blame them when it's too confusing for you (or your accountant) to distill into the form of a tax return correctly. What do you do with cancelled trades? How do you make sure they are discarded? (They should probably reflect on the data sheet somehow, right?) And what do you do when you trade on more than one market, or when you bring cryptocurrency from another source that already has a cost basis? Your itemized gains and losses are now incorrect, unless you provide an interface to express that cost basis into the system. And now you aren't just a market, you're an accounting platform. This sounds more and more like a problem for bitcoin.tax to solve, and not Coinbase. An API is the way to provide an interface to the data that is stored in your service (for customers, or anyone else.) The data that is not inside of your service, you don't need to take responsibility for as a service provider. As an API or service provider, there is an opportunity to answer these kinds of questions insofar as you feel responsible, in the interface documentation.