@liliasergey
I am not a tax professional, but from what I read you have two potential taxable events when dealing with Crypto transactions and it is similar to trading stocks/dividends:
1) Receiving Crypto as income (interest, rewards, mining, etc)
2) Buy/Sell Crypto which is a Capital Gain/Losses event
For Crypto it is key to keep track of the specific coin value in USD at the time it is either traded or received as reward, income, etc.
For example. Lets say you loaned me one Bitcoin in May of last year. I gave it back to in July and gave you 1 Ethereum as payment for the loan. Then, the USD value of the Ethereum must be reported as income. If multiple loans and interest payments took place on monthly basis, then you would just report the total interest earned amount (just like it is done for interest from CDs, dividends, etc)
Then, lets say you decide to sell you Ethereum (you got as income) on December. Now you have a Capital Gain/Loss event. You would have to report the USD value when you got the coin (cost basis) and then the USD value when you sold it. If the USD value of Ethereum dropped from July to December, then you would report a capital loss for your taxes.
If you do not sell your Ethereum, then you would only report it as income (but it is key to keep track of the USD value when you got it, so when you sell it next year, years, etc, you can file the Capital Gains/Loss event in your taxes.
@Basement_Buzzard
Yes. I saw there was a court case in which mining was ruled not to be reported as income. I guess the crypto tax rules are not quite set yet. If I had thousands of dollars in crypto rewards and interest, I would probably get a professional opinion. Since I have pocket change crypto income, I will just report it as income to avoid an audit (been there done that)
