Progress Report

[dcdpr]

We've found that reporting capital gains for trades made on exchanges is not sufficient for automating one's taxes when there are later spends that use UTXOs with histories that passed through the exchanges, and have extended the program's features into tracking basis on all wallet transactions as well.

[dcdpr]

Taxcount will not be released to Github for the April tax season of tax year 2023. Progress is steady, but the code is not ready.

[dcdpr]

Taxcount is operational and can now talk with a local bitcoind or esplora server to make sense of wallet transactions (when sufficiently notified of history). Its first job, calculating gains on transactions found in history files off exchanges, has also seen improvements. Code cleanup is underway.

[dcdpr]

Taxcount has seen some important code cleanup. There is more to do, but delay could be reduced by dropping some ego and posting the current code, allowing the community to watch ongoing work and suggest improvements along the way. We will get more brutal about decisions like that in January of 2024, in order to release something of relevance for the 2024 tax season.

We will not release without a tool that helps users capture data and anonymize the irrelevant details, to build tests. So far, this process has been proceeding manually and imperfectly, and we need to automate it so that users can confidently help collect edge cases in their transaction histories, without revealing their actual trades.

As it exists today, Taxcount is moderately straightforward to use if you give it xpubs and exchange data for prior years, and allow it to build the history up to the year of interest - which should cover most users. Since that is not a reasonable request for many Bitcoiners, it is also helpfully throws errors until the user inputs consistent basis declarations for spent UTXOs, allowing an iterative review process while bootstrapping from any point in time with any wallet technology.