Crypto is growing up a lot faster than many of us ever imagined. With mainstream adoption of the blockchain inching closer and governments taking notice, being personally responsible and trying to stay legit has proven a difficult challenge.
A large portion of this challenge is tax liability in relation to your crypto earnings. Regardless of your opinion on the subject of taxes - if you plan on staying legit, it's something you'll want to end up accounting for in one way or another.
This post is not tax advice and doesn't serve to provide any guidance on how to report Steem earnings.
I won't pretend to know what I'm talking about here. Tax law is a subject that I am not well versed in and you shouldn't listen to anyone randomly on the internet about what you should do. Hire a professional if you need advice.
With that out of the way, what I can offer assistance in is the retrieval of account history in a way I believe will be useful for accounting.
Rewards History Exporter
I have created a small set of aggregation queries that utility @furion's SteemData.com. These queries can be batched/executed from a command line interface, provided the mongo-shell application is currently installed.
https://github.com/aaroncox/steemdata-reward-history
This isn't an ideal solution and not everyone has the knowledge required to use this tool, but my hopes is that those who can use it will help those that can't. Hell, maybe someone will wrap a gui-like interface around it or even create a bot that will do it for anyone that requests it.
What this tool does is allows you to specify an account name and a year and retrieve the following information by date:
- Witness Rewards
- Author Rewards
- Curation Rewards
- Beneficiary Rewards
- Powerdown events (in the case you are advised to account for this)
The script itself generates a CSV (aka "spreadsheet compatible" file) for each of the above. These CSVs are grouped by date and a real USD value is determined based on historical prices. This data can then be interpreted and used for accounting purposes.
For example, here is a portion of the CSV for my author rewards:
| date | sbd | vests | steem | sp | usd_steem_gain | usd_sbd_gain | usd_total_gain |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2017-1-3 | 0.25 | 5103.928965 | 0.708 | 2.44371 | 0.504 | 0.25 | 0.754274 |
| 2017-1-22 | 0.026 | 513.088526 | 0.078 | 0.245453 | 0.0517 | 0.02574 | 0.077492 |
| 2017-1-24 | 77.939 | 1545245.306209 | 244.514 | 740.562 | 147.761 | 77.939 | 225.700457 |
| 2017-2-12 | 1.999 | 46554.786977 | 8.417 | 22.259790 | 4.294 | 2.01899 | 6.313740 |
| 2017-2-15 | 3.39 | 95125.144755 | 20.398 | 45.333489 | 8.545 | 3.3561 | 11.901193 |
| 2017-2-17 | 5.334 | 155588.300488 | 34.358 | 74.577938 | 15.251 | 5.280 | 20.53169 |
| 2017-2-18 | 5.584 | 166049.723567 | 37.203 | 79.632885 | 15.18 | 5.52816 | 20.716825 |
| 2017-2-21 | 0.007 | 293.673191 | 0.081 | 0.1405807 | 0.024 | 0.00693 | 0.031303 |
The date and usd_total_gain are likely the only two fields that actually matter when it comes to accounting, but the rest are included to show the breakdown of which currencies were earned on those dates and how much.
Contributions welcome!
I built this application based on the expectations of a handful of interpretations of the current laws - you may find you need the data represented differently. I'd welcome anyone that needs additional/alternative reporting to contribute to the project or simply fork it to make your own.
Over the course of the next few years, an incredible demand will exist for software that accomplishes this sort of accounting, not just for Steem but for all blockchain related projects.
Special thanks out to @furion for running SteemData.com and reindexing the database recently to account for some missing data!