Crypto taxes (in the US) are a big, fear-inducing barrier to broader adoption

Been doing my own taxes since we still did 'em with paper and pencil. Used TurboTax for a decade+ now. This year my crypto taxes were worse than last. I was careful to limit my transactions all year. After cleaning up transactions directly on Coinbase (because the "integration" still fails miserably - just straight up doesn't work), I got the CSV, imported, and was immediately prompted that I needed to review ~150 items. F

Spent a few hours over several days cursing and going through them and doing what I could. The funny thing is that even within the CEX itself, which is a massive publicly traded company mind you, the calcuations are still completely fucked. Coinbase will "sell" my asset a few days later according to the CSV, or sell it in chunks rather than all at once, or have dust sales, all of which end up with goofy things like $0 cost basis. Even the raw data doesn't make sense in a number of places.

Don't get me started on DeFi, that's basically impossible. Places like CoinTracker will charge you based on usage if you have a large number of transactions. If you have a well diversified portfolio where you regularly perform swaps, you can just forget it. You will be asked to pay thousands just for a tax aggregator.

I did the best I could. IRS has ~100 pages of transactions they can sort through if they want. Decided to upgrade to MAX protection for the first time ever just because I don't want to hear about it. I'm not a CPA, but at this point I might as well be.

It could be worse. I have a second order aquaintance who mined BTC back in the day, did some napkin math and freaked out. Hired a good CPA with a long tenure, paid her well, and dropped several piles of paper on her desk. She about quit and is scared about what might happen if she messed up to this day.

The problem is that crypto is built to be different than our current worldwide financial system from the ground up, so the tax laws just don't fit from the ground up.

We're still early fam. Way, way early. John Smith is NOT ready for this.