I've been freaking out about taxes for the past week after reading @jerrybanfield's article Steemit Tax Calculation and Payment System. The method Jerry describes in the post is fairly straightforward and easy to implement and I will be doing so from this point on, but...
- What about past rewards?
- Will I need to amend my 2016 filing?
- How the heck can I even calculate my past earnings?
At first I thought about writing a script that would fetch all of my rewards and historical price data to have this information automatically calculated. However, after glancing at the SteemJS API and searching for an easily parsable source for price data, I quickly realized that this was going to take much more effort than I was willing to put into it.
There had to be an easier way. Well, thanks to @jesta's SteemDB I found a method that provides a decent estimate of the value of your past earnings in a "fairly" short amount of time.
I joined Steemit in July of 2016 and I was able to create a table containing all of my author earnings with their approximated USD value at the time they were redeemed in a little over an hour. Here is how I did it...
Visit: https://steemdb.com/@your-username-goes-here/authoring
It will contain a table with ALL of your steem rewards to date. Copy the entire table.
Paste the table copied from SteemDB into a blank spreadsheet. The cells for SBD, STEEM, and SP contain some text that will need to be stripped so that you can apply formulas to these values. A simple Find and Replace applied to these cells takes care of that in a matter of seconds.
Next add columns for the price of STEEM and SBD. For each date that you received rewards, manually enter the STEEM and SBD price on that date. I did this using coinmarketcap.com which was a simple tool to use for this purpose. Now I realize that manually fetching price data is an inelegant solution, but keep in mind that my goal was to create this table in the shortest time possible. In this instance, manual data entry was faster than developing an automated solution.
So now you have a table with your Steem rewards and price data. All that is left to do is calculate your earnings. I added 3 columns: SBD USD Value, STEEM/SP USD Value, and TOTAL USD Value. A few seconds later I had added my formulas and my approximated total Steem earnings in USD had been calculated.
If you are a big time curator, it is probably best to repeat this process with your curation rewards as well.
Depending on where you live, you probably should be paying taxes on your Steem rewards. Hopefully the method described above proves useful for someone.
