Today we upgraded Bitcoin.Tax. We also migrated over to some new hardware, which unfortuately did mean the servers were offline for several hours last night, but back this morning.

There have been a few additional teething issues today that have caused a couple of outages and errors. Our apologies for any inconvenience. Please contact our support team if you are still seeing issues so we can investigate.

Calculation Improvements

One of the main improvements is the speed of handling larger volumes. This is being rolled out in phases and starts with the calculation engine itself. This is the part responsible for working out the gains for trades and matching costs basis across the various methods.

As the number of trades (all your opening, trades, income and spending) increases, along with the number of different coins traded, so the time taken to work these out increases. With users now commonly having tens of thousands of trades, this could be slow and was putting a strain on the system, causing it to be generally slower for everyone.

We've done a number of things to work toward impoving this situation, not only the optimization of the calculation engine but also to move high-volume accounts to specialized servers. This allows them to have longer-running tasks done efficiently as well as not overloading the main users.

The huge increase in users over the last year has also meant the need to upgrade our infrastructure. Harware and people. To support this we have also changed our plans where those heavier users pay more. There are now tiered plans from 1,000 to 100,000 trades.

We know (and have) users above that, so while we are working Stage 2 of our volume rollout, we are also working on dedicated plans for really high volume users to handle their needs better.

Lastly, we have offered a free-tier since 2013 and the majority of our active users utilize this. We are glad we could offer such a valuable service to the community over the years, but it has reached the point where the resources required to support this have become too costly.

The free tier has been reduced to 20 trades for 2017 onwards (this was unintentially being applied to 2016 too, but is being corrected). The 8949 and tax package downloads have also been moved into the first Premium tier.

We hope this will allow us to grow the infrastructre adequately in order to support everyone's needs in the future.

1031 like-kind exchange and Form 8824

Even though the Trump tax plan for 2018 has removed the ambiguity of whether digital currencies can make use of a 1031 like-kind exchange, we are still able to calculate those deferred gains for past years and provide an 8824 downloadable statement.

We use an attachable statement (much like the 8949 statement) since each trade would otherwise require one form and a single sheet of paper. This is likely going to kill a few forests, so following the opinion of tax experts, we instead produce the statement that can be condensed and printed in a much smaller size.

2FA / Two-factor Authentication

The most voted item on our suggestions list has, since the beginning, been adding 2FA.

We are happy to announce that is now live allowing you to secure your account.

Please go to the bottom of your Account tab, entering your current password to begin adding 2FA to your account. We use standard HTOP so you can use any mobile app authenticator, such as Google Authenticator, Authenticator+ or Authy.

Closing Prices

Bitcoin.Tax had originally been used more of a pre-tax preparation tool and so our prices were updated less frequently. Daily for the major digital currencies and weekly (getting the last 7 day prices) for lesser used coins.

With recent large fluctuations, delayed prices in the Closing Report make is seem out of date and inaccurate.

We have taken on your feedback and now keep live prices for many currencies from a selection of sources to display with the current year's closing report. This should give a much more accurate picture of your remaining holdings.

Professional Edition

Our tax professional edition has grown in usage over the year and now supports unlimited clients, either as managed accounts or accounting linking. An existing Bitcoin.Tax user can share their trade data with a tax professional (fully or ready-only) with mutual consent.

We are also working on allowing tax professionals to create user accounts giving their clients full access as if they were using Bitcoin.Tax themselves.

Tax Advice

We wish we could offer our users the tax advice they need. Unfortunately, as a software provider, we just aren't authorized to give tax or financial advice. Despite this, we have built a list of self-registered CPAs and accountants over the years, that proclaim their knowledge in handling digital currencies. However, we know most of them are now extremely busy with the number of contacts they have received.

So we still want a way to be able to offer a scalable tax advice and preparation plaform...

....I think some good news is coming.

Bitcoin.Tax is leading capital gains calculator for digital currencies for US and worldwide users, traders and investors. You can try Bitcoin.Tax at https://bitcoin.tax/signup.

This post is the opinion of the author and not financial or tax advice. Please speak to your own expert, CPA or tax attorney on how you should treat taxation of digital currencies. A list of Bitcoin and digital-currency knowledgeable accountants can be found at https://bitcoin.tax/cpa.