Remaining wallet & tx issues

[write_on]

First, Chandan, in his post “How do I track my local/cold/hardware wallet? Why is it showing zero balance?” requested:
“If you have other coins in cold wallets which we do not yet support, please let us know which ones so we can prioritize adding local wallet support for those blockchains.”
Here is my list: STRAT DGB KMD ZEN DCR

Q: I assume that when I received free coins by Air Drop or Coinbase Earn, I should manually adjust the Cost Basis to “0,” if necessary? Does it matter if the stated grant from Coinbase was $10, but I received ~ $9.96?

Q: I have added the xPub addresses for two Bitcoin accounts–BTC 1 and BTC 2.If I go to Portfolio>Wallets, and check the balance for BTC 1, it matches (close enough) what Ledger says. But my BTC 2 balance reads “0.” Chandan also addressed this issue in the aforementioned post.

How do I know my address is correct? I copied and pasted the xPub address from BTC 2 Advanced Logs. I tried to do it again, to make sure. CoinTracker wouldn’t let me, because it had already been added.

Does it really have a non-zero balance? According to Ledger (and memory), it has a substantial balance. (I do not see how to check this with the BTC Explorer. I just don’t know how to use that.) Back to CoinTracker, if I open the Wallet, then the list of Transactions, they match what Ledger says. Moreover, each of those txs has in information icon. If I hover over that, I see the remaining balance, after that tx. Following all the way up to the last tx, I find there a substantial balance of BTC. So the Transaction list knows it’s there, but the Wallet balance does not! What can I do?

Q: Here’s the hard one: The Changelly .csv file I uploaded to CoinTracker shows a Total Fee of .25 for every tx, without naming the Unit used. (My records show a variety of amounts, but I’m never sure what’s accurate, what belongs to which leg of the tx, etc. The blockchain txs only give me a fee rate.) CoinTracker has interpreted all of these fees as .25 of the receiving coin. This makes no sense. In the case of .25 BTC, that yields a Fee of $2,xxx.xx! Yet this seems to not affect the Cost Basis at all! How should I edit these Changelly fees?

BTW, I’ve had to do considerable tx editing, when Changelly or ShapeShift was used, but I think I figured it out, except for the above.

Thanks for your help. I think I’m almost there!

[Chandan]

Hi @write_on,

Thanks for the questions and sorry about the hassle. Please see comments inline below.

Here is my list: STRAT DGB KMD ZEN DCR

Thanks! We will work on adding these. In the meantime you can still bulk upload these via CSV or via manual entry.

Q: I assume that when I received free coins by Air Drop or Coinbase Earn, I should manually adjust the Cost Basis to “0,” if necessary?

Only if the basis was truly zero. Otherwise the auto-detected basis should be right and you can mark these received transactions as "payment"s

Does it matter if the stated grant from Coinbase was $10, but I received ~ $9.96?

In this case it would be appropriate to edit the basis and set it to 9.96 (we are working on doing this automatically but you can do it manually for now.

Q: I have added the xPub addresses for two Bitcoin accounts–BTC 1 and BTC 2.If I go to Portfolio>Wallets, and check the balance for BTC 1, it matches (close enough) what Ledger says. But my BTC 2 balance reads “0.” Chandan also addressed this issue in the aforementioned post.

Update: we just pushed a fix for this — should be working now. Please let us know if not.

Q: Here’s the hard one: The Changelly .csv file I uploaded to CoinTracker shows a Total Fee of .25 for every tx, without naming the Unit used. (My records show a variety of amounts, but I’m never sure what’s accurate, what belongs to which leg of the tx, etc. The blockchain txs only give me a fee rate.) CoinTracker has interpreted all of these fees as .25 of the receiving coin. This makes no sense. In the case of .25 BTC, that yields a Fee of $2,xxx.xx! Yet this seems to not affect the Cost Basis at all! How should I edit these Changelly fees?

Unfortunately we have to assume if the information is incomplete. You can go into those transactions and edit them to put in the correct currency (or remove it altogether if you have no idea)

BTW, I’ve had to do considerable tx editing, when Changelly or ShapeShift was used, but I think I figured it out, except for the above.

Sorry about that. We are going to work on trying to make these more seamless integrations.

Thanks for your help. I think I’m almost there!

You bet! Thanks for sticking with it!

[write_on]

Hi Chandan,

I’m adding responses inline, below.

@Chandan

Hi @write_on,

Thanks for the questions and sorry about the hassle. Please see comments inline below.

Here is my list: STRAT DGB KMD ZEN DCR

Thanks! We will work on adding these. In the meantime you can still bulk upload these via CSV or via manual entry.

These were all Changelly transactions, where I sent one coin from Ledger to Changelly, and received back a different coin. I did upload the CSV file from Changelly, and the system picked those up. I added addresses from transactions on Ledger, and the system picked those up. But I often had to sort out what was a Transfer and what was a Trade, and sometimes had to manually add a missing step. I had to reconstruct those trades, and manually edit, to fix the system’s understandable confusion.

Q: I assume that when I received free coins by Air Drop or Coinbase Earn, I should manually adjust the Cost Basis to “0,” if necessary?

Only if the basis was truly zero. Otherwise the auto-detected basis should be right and you can mark these received transactions as "payment"s

I must not be understanding something correctly here. If those Air Drops and Earned coins cost me nothing (except maybe the $.04 I didn’t get out of the $10 promised), why would my Cost Basis be anything other than zero? (That means , when the coins are sold, I will have a higher taxable gain. So I’m not trying to duck out of taxes owed!) In a couple of cases, with Air Drops, the system said it could not determine the Cost Basis, so left it at zero.

Does it matter if the stated grant from Coinbase was $10, but I received ~ $9.96?

In this case it would be appropriate to edit the basis and set it to 9.96 (we are working on doing this automatically but you can do it manually for now.

Why would I have a Cost Basis of $9.96, if it cost me nothing?

Q: I have added the xPub addresses for two Bitcoin accounts–BTC 1 and BTC 2.If I go to Portfolio>Wallets, and check the balance for BTC 1, it matches (close enough) what Ledger says. But my BTC 2 balance reads “0.” Chandan also addressed this issue in the aforementioned post.

Update: we just pushed a fix for this — should be working now. Please let us know if not.

It works! Thanks!

Q: Here’s the hard one: The Changelly .csv file I uploaded to CoinTracker shows a Total Fee of .25 for every tx, without naming the Unit used. (My records show a variety of amounts, but I’m never sure what’s accurate, what belongs to which leg of the tx, etc. The blockchain txs only give me a fee rate.) CoinTracker has interpreted all of these fees as .25 of the receiving coin. This makes no sense. In the case of .25 BTC, that yields a Fee of $2,xxx.xx! Yet this seems to not affect the Cost Basis at all! How should I edit these Changelly fees?

Unfortunately we have to assume if the information is incomplete. You can go into those transactions and edit them to put in the correct currency (or remove it altogether if you have no idea)

I just discovered that I can go into the transaction history in Changelly, and pick up the correct Network fees from there! I don’t know why those didn’t hit the CSV file.

That solves the immediate problem, but I’m still confused about some things. For one thing, how is it that a $2,000 BTC fee doesn’t even affect the cost Basis? This makes me wonder if any of the fees are affecting the Cost Basis. And isn’t there a standard to follow, so all fees are quoted in either the sending or receiving coin? Wouldn’t I therefore know what currency to use? As I’ve attempted to keep my own records while trading crypto, I’ve seen multiple fees quoted in different sources, for the same transaction. I’ve never figured out how many fees there are, who charges what kind of fee, etc. I’ve often been stumped about interpreting the whole fee thing!

In fact, I have just noticed that the fees I recorded for these Changelly transactions bear little resemblance to what the transaction history shows. I’m so confused! ##

BTW, I’ve had to do considerable tx editing, when Changelly or ShapeShift was used, but I think I figured it out, except for the above.

Sorry about that. We are going to work on trying to make these more seamless integrations.

My editing is explained above. Thanks for continuing to improve the program, and the quick fix for my zero balance error!

Please just help me out with the Cost Basis for free coins. Then I can hopefully leave you alone! ##

Thanks for your help. I think I’m almost there!

You bet! Thanks for sticking with it!

[Chandan]

Hey @write_on,

Cases of airdrops/earned coins are a grey area in the eyes of the IRS. Based on the latest guidance, the most likely interpretation the IRS has is that airdropped/earned coins are like income. That means if you get $10 of XLM from Coinbase Earn, even if you pay nothing to get them, that would count as $10 of income and the basis of those coins would be $10.

If you knowingly choose that you don’t want to follow this approach and take a more aggressive stance that airdrops/earned coins are $0.00 basis, you can choose to do this at your own risk. To do so, you can edit the transactions and mark as 0.00 basis.

CoinTracker defaults to the more likely and more conservative approach of assigning the fair market value at the time received as income and the basis of the asset.