It's the middle of March and that means Tax time is quickly approaching.

If you are like most American's, this is the time of year that you dread, even more so if you are a cryptocurrency trader.

In most cases taxes are already taken out of your earnings, however, in the case of trading, that onus is mostly on you.

Exchanges are not sending your trading history to the IRS, though Coinbase did send some from users up through 2015, but that is a topic for another day.

In general we have to figure out our reporting requirements when dealing with cryptos.

Coinbase launched a new tool that will at least attempt to make that process slightly easier for you.

If you go to your Coinbase account, you can click on the "Tools" tab and then you will see a new sub heading called "Tax Center".

That should look something like this:

Awesome!

As you can see, you can go back and see all your transactions for any of the last 3 years.

The only downside in all of this is that this tool really only helps you if you both bought and sold your tokens on Coinbase.

Considering that most of the people reading this are on steemit.com blogging to earn steem, it is highly unlikely that your Coinbase holdings were both bought and sold on Coinbase.

Either way though, this is a welcome addition to Coinbase.

The entire release can be seen here:

https://blog.coinbase.com/new-tax-tools-on-coinbase-4d2598544d9e

Tax help for steemit users?

Now all we need is someone to build an app on Steem that will help calculate the taxes owed for steemit.com earnings.

By the way, is there any legitimate claim to be made that the earnings on steemit.com could be classified as a gift for tax purposes?

In the tax code when it is mentioned being paid in crypto for goods/services rendered, that technically isn't what is happening on steemit.com.

There is no specific individual/entity paying you for services rendered.

Some insight on the topic would be much appreciated.

Stay informed my friends.

Follow me: @jrcornel