I have been thinking a lot lately about what is stopping me from regularly spending sats and one of the problems I find that adds friction is dealing with the tax implications with regards to capital gains/losses.
I plan an adding a nice UI around Nifty's bookkeeper plugin to Clams which will help with exporting CLN data, but then we also need a good service for turning that data in to proper tax documents.
I have been using Koinly for taxes up until now (and bookkeeper can export to Koinly format), but they support altcoins, the UI is kinda a pain to work with and it is not clear how to account for Lightning correctly.
Does anyone know of any Bitcoin only tax tools/UI's that already exist?
If there is not already a great tool out there, I would be up for teaming up with any accountants on here to create a browser app that you can dump your onchain and offchain transaction data into and it will spit out the correct tax form for your jurisdiction.
I am thinking the initial feature set could be:
  • Bitcoin only
  • Client side app only. No logging or server code so it is completely private
  • Open source. Anyone can audit or run locally if they would like
  • Upload data from your node manually (with instructions on what cli commands to run on each node implementation). Future versions could allow for connecting to a node directly using Lnmessage or Lightning Node Connect
If there are any accountants on here that have the required expertise, hit me up!
The only open source option that I've seen is rotki
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Thanks for the link, I will check it out.
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After playing around with it for a bit, it looks solid. I reckon a Bitcoin focused app that is similar to Rotki but also exports tax forms like Koinly does would be killer.
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That would be country dependent plus tax rules might change every year, so that's a lot of work.
Probably only commercial products like koinly will be bothered to do all that.
Maybe an open source alternative with paid support might appear though.
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Yeah I agree it would be a lot of work. I was thinking that it could start with support for a few major countries and branch out from there. I bet there would be ways to monetise with premium features like Rotki. It is not exactly an idea I would excited to work on, but feels like something that is super important to get the circular economy happening. I want to get merchants accepting Bitcoin, but I also feel like I need to inform them of the tax burden involved. It would be great if it was recognised as legal tender everywhere instead, maybe the effort is best spent there?
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пока что без налогов... идут в неизвестном направлении
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