This is the real question. Doing taxes my first year was easy. The following year is was much harder.

The tool does, it will carry over the cost basis from previous years of trading for calculating the next year's short/long term gains.

For Robinhood crypto, there's form8949.com which is generally fantastic. It can import from a number of crypto exchanges in addition to the traditional brokers.

Doesn't Robinhood already provide crypto transactions in their Form 1099?

If you didn't keep proper records, then use the cost basis of your crypto as 0 and report the sale price as pure profit. You will never under pay your taxes that way, and if your numbers are low enough, it's probably worth it to overpay on taxes than to spend the time recovering detailed records of what happened in between.

If it's too big of a number for you, then better remake / recover those records. Luckily you have a permanent record called the blockchain.

If you need a rule of thumb, for example you want to have a rough idea what your taxes would be like to see if you're comfortable doing some liquidation or something, then sure. I'd back-of-the-napkin long-term gains at 20%, and short-term at 35% (covers both federal and state; assumes U.S.).*

Again, very rough. You need concrete numbers once you do actual trading, because in the U.S. you are required to make estimated tax payments. The actual numbers can, for example, vary wildly from nearly 0% to upwards of 50%.

* These are based on a typical 15% federal tax on long-term gains and 5% for state taxes; or 35% being a comfortable average for most people's effective tax rate in the U.S. for short term gains. The 50% tax rate is approached when you have largish gains, toward $1 mil or so, and live in expensive states like New York or California.

> 10% of your profits

Calculating your profits (and loses) is what these sites generally do -- that is usually the hard part, especially if you have a lot of transactions. Not to mention, the way that you calculate that differs by jurisdiction. Loses are just as important since they can have a significant benefit to the taxes you owe. I use bitcoin.tax and then export the data for my accountant to fit into the rest of my tax return.

In the US, profit on crypto is straight up capital gains. Held for less than a year = short term capital gains, taxed as regular income. Long term depends state-to-state, but overall taxed less than income (federal has 3 brackets - 0, 15, 20% depending on your income. 500k+ puts you in the 20% bracket)

From a tax perspective, sure. If you bought any time before the fall of 2017, and sold any time in 2018, it's pretty easy to have realized a gain in 2018.

Many people sold BTC at $14k+ and then bought back in at 10k, 5k, etc. If they didn't sell again for all of 2018 they'd only have "realized gains" and no realized loses. So on paper they'd have only have gains, as the IRS doesn't recognize the market value of your current holdings.

Of course.

You can short established coins like BTC and ETH.

There are also so called "flip seasons" where you throw money at random small cap altcoins and flip them 30-200% higher over the course of a month. These happen whenever BTC settles down and consolidates before plunging to news lows.

Tax compliance can be high because the people with the most to lose just buy themselves loopholes - eg there's no requirement to file an FBAR for fine art! Enforcement resources can then be focused on keeping the middle class in line.

Pay unto Caesar and all that. But avoiding taxes through financial privacy is not equivalent to stealing. And certainly don't imply that an empire's aggressive wars are in any way akin to local community services!

Tax compliance is high when counterparty (employer or broker) reports income. Tax compliance on cash transactions is lower.

I don't think stealing books from library at any kind of scale approaching the value of tax evasion is so easy to get away with.

> Yes, it is quite easy to pay taxes on crypto

I only ever played with small amounts for fun, and in the long term, I took losses. But it's very difficult for me to compile all my trades for tax reasons. I set up automated trading on half a dozen different exchanges (some of which no longer exist) using half-baked python scripts with no logs. How on earth do I compile a Form 8453 showing all of those thousands of trades? I could spend months tracking down all the public keys I used and use blockchain explorers to compile a list of transactions... but I would not describe this as easy

What exchanges would you like to see added? Constantly working on new additions.