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Comment by unnouinceput | Hacker News Reader

Quote: "In late August, the agency released guidance affirming that taxpayers who receive crypto for completing “microtasks” must declare it as income. This applies to users of firms like StormX, which makes tiny payments in crypto to people who do small tasks such as playing games, answering surveys, or evaluating products."

Ahhh, but this is heaven. If I'd be an US citizen doing crypto transactions I'd made sure after each of them to write them down already prepared. Then when tax declaration season comes hit IRS with a bag of 20 kilos of paper in declarations. No more than 1000 people to do this and trust me, IRS will change their tune so fast your head will spin.

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People in crypto have this bizarre fantasy of the IRS as a place where they still keep everything in paper files.

The IRS processes more tax returns every year than the entire EU combined. It switched to digital files a long time ago. If you file your return by paper, it gets scanned into a digital copy and the original gets carted off to a warehouse somewhere in the mid-West. If you get audited, the auditor is looking at a digital copy of your file. If they are looking at a paper copy, it is because they printed that copy out for personal convenience.

If you send the IRS 20 kilos of papers, the people who they hire seasonally will process your 20 kilos of papers and an automated system will scan and convert each and every page. Though generally, if your tax return would exceed a certain length, you are now required to file electronically and any supporting attachments are to be kept on file so they can be requested by the IRS as necessary.

(On a somewhat bizarre note, the tax court requires paper copies of all filings and documents, though in some circuits the tax court now allows discovery to be satisfied through the provisioning of digital copies.)

If you have tried one of the robo investors, the amount of transactions that they generate, even under routine usage (regular contributions, tax loss harvesting etc.), it is beyond any human's ability to comprehend. Fortunately for IRS, computers can very easily track, trace and make sense of large volumes of transactional data without breaking a sweat.

The way US taxes generally work is that you don't provide the transaction-level details to the IRS when you file your taxes, just the aggregate. You only provide the transaction-level details if and when you are asked to during an audit.

Read the article. In regards to crypto they expect exactly that. Here is another quote from article, above:

"“Buying a sandwich with cryptocurrency shouldn’t be a taxable event,” says Sean Cover, a New York City cryptocurrency holder who works in finance for a nonprofit group. He says that in 2017 he had more than 500 transactions on several platforms, and it took him 10 hours to prepare his crypto tax forms even though he paid for special software. "

Oh, you're right, it looks like the IRS requires every crypto transaction to be listed on form 8949. My mistake.

A crypto transaction is a transaction of a capital asset, so yes, it is exactly that and Sean should choose to use regular USD next time if he doesn't want to track all of his capital asset transactions. You live by the sword, you die by the sword, and all that.

But generally if your return would exceed a certain length you now have to file electronically.

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