Bitcoin Guides For Financial Professionals
I have noticed that a lot of readers come across this site incidentally or in the process of doing research. If you are new to digital currencies, here are a few recently updated bitcoin guides and other resources that will help you on your way.
Bitcoin IRS Tax Guide For Individuals Filers
Investopedia’s Bitcoin IRS Tax Guide is not authoritative in the sense that it can be relied upon in itself as a source of information. However, bitcoin entrepreneur Ryan Selkis (the author of the series and also TBI’s Daily Bit) does provide an informative and witty discussion of the major points of friction in digital currency taxation, many of which remain unresolved by the IRS. If you know nothing about bitcoin tax law, then Selkis’ work is a good place to start.
Introduction to Digital Currency for Professionals
Libra Tax provides basis tracking and gain/loss calculation for digital currency traders. Additionally, the platform is developing a referral service for digital currency accountants (sort of like Intuit’s TurboTax CPA Select) that pairs with a soon to be released multi-client version. This white paper is another excellent source of basic information free of bias/hype/ideological pronouncement. Full disclosure: I am affiliated with Libra as an advisor and had a hand in writing this paper.
This website, maintained by tax attorney and cryptocurrency advocate Tyler Robbins, provides an annotated, detailed analysis of the tax law as it applies to digital currencies. Don’t let the title fool you- the information applies to all digital currencies.
This piece appeared in the “expert advice” section of Find Accounting Software‘s corporate blog. This cleverly-named company provides consulting services to help other companies select accounting software products. The CFO’s Guide is targeted at potential business users of digital currencies (specifically bitcoin). As such, it focuses on the business use case, as opposed to privacy or other social or political issues. It is well researched and contains links to many other news stories and sites. The Guide is a three part piece, but the parts don’t appear to be linked together, so you’ll have to hunt around on the site if you want to read all of them.
The various bitcoin oriented sub-reddits deserve an honorable mention here for their tireless community of rabid digital currency advocates. They can be a tremendous resource for finding out what is going on in the community and developing contacts with other bitcoin investors and entrepreneurs. Beware: they are NOT good resources for solid tax or accounting advice.
Do you have a favorite resource? Let us know in the comments!
Bitcoin has solved most of the complications and problems that used to face doing this in the old government currency days. Overseas bank accounts, geoblocking sportsbooks and international payments problems are all non issues thanks to bitcoin. Make use of it!