I completely agree with you. Bought GBTC as a convenient way to hold BTC. As you noted, it gets very complicated. Sure, I can go through each of their sales of the underlying BTC to pay expenses and determine if each of those made a capital gain/loss. I can adjust my purchase price basis in dollars for my GBTC shares and also adjust how many BTC in the trust I still control. I ran all the numbers for 2020 (purchased GBTC in April 2020), and my figures at the end for proceeds matched my TD Ameritrade statement; however, since TD Ameritrade didn't list the basis for each expense sale, I had to do that spreadsheet. That is painful, but sort of manageable. However, when I see I must do this all separately for each separate lot of GBTC shares I have purchased, now that is really getting out of hand. Too many spreadsheets. All those investment expenses do add up, but even with itemization, I believe they fall in the miscellaneous deductions, and that needs to be > 2% of you AGI to have an impact if I remember correctly. Not going to get there. I am very tempted to just sell it all when my shortest held lot hits the long term capital gains mark and then just put it in BTC directly. GBTC is nice, but unless it converts to an ETF and if that fixes this complicated nonsense.
I guess the other option is to just get to the Long term capital gains line. Sell all the lots. Wait for > 30 days (and maybe the next correction) and re-buy as one big lot to avoid the wash-sale rules. Gotta be a better way!
