Hello and thank you for your reply.
Since there are over 1200 nearly-unique items and there aren't any real tools to track down the price history for cards which were acquired piecemeal over the past decade, putting together those records seems more or less impossible and even if I did do that, would wind up being mostly the theater of putting in effort. I'm not sure it makes much sense to go that direction unless I just say the original cost basis was $0 even though it most definitely wasn't.
Would it be credible and accurate to declare that income as hobby income? I am currently still engaged in the practice of buying and collecting cards and sell some of them to help fund upgrades. I've engaged in selling on and off some years since 2015 and since then have generated $24,000 in sales while spending around $20,000 on new collectibles and around $2,000 in sales expenses. By year only in 2 or maybe even only 1 of the last 5 years have I made a profit, and I don't expect to going forward. It's just that in 2022 I did many more sales and so I'm not sure if the volume of sales/amount of money involved would lead the IRS to consider that a business.
