Beancount looks like it can track Bitcoin transactions, which require eight
decimal places. In my experiments with Beancount 2.0b13 running on Ubuntu
12.0.4, the Bitcoin balances looked okay, but the dollar balances were
presented with too many decimal places. Perhaps I missed some Beancount
option.
This small sample Beancount file shows the structure of my accounts and two
sample transactions. I wrote a small script to write Beancount transactions
from a CSV file exported from my Bitcoin wallet.
option "operating_currency" "USD"
option "inferred_tolerance_default" "USD:0.01"
option "experiment_booking_algorithm" "FULL"
2016-11-01 commodity USD
2016-11-01 commodity BTC
2016-11-01 open Assets:Wallet BTC "FIFO"
2016-11-01 open Income:BitcoinMining
2016-11-01 open Income:CapitalGains
2016-11-01 open Expenses:MiningRental
2016-12-05 * "Big Mining Pool" "Mining pool income"
Assets:Wallet 0.24304715 BTC {}
Income:BitcoinMining -182.72 USD
2016-12-06 * "Fast Mining Rentals" "Mining rental service"
Assets:Wallet -0.16090000 BTC {}
Expenses:MiningRental 121.84 USD
Income:CapitalGains
Following the IRS guidelines, Bitcoins received from mining activity is
treated as income. The Bitcoin wallet reports the number of Bitcoins
received and the equivalent dollar amount. Beancount can infer Bitcoin
prices from the transaction. The inferred prices look reasonable.
When spending Bitcoins, for mining rental expense in the example, any
increase or decrease in Bitcoin value must be tracked as a capital gain or
loss. With the recent FIFO booking algorithm, Beancount can select the
earliest Bitcoin lots from the wallet account, infer their price, and
compute the capital gain. This appears to work.
As I experiment with more and more transactions, the wallet and capital
gains USD account balances increase from two decimal places to 27 decimal
places. For example,
- 10 transactions: 10.97
- 100 transactions: 51.32000000000000000000000000 USD
- 1000 transactions: 6675.575739409965261575154249 USD
I haven't found the exact tipping point. All transactions are structured
like the examples.
What am I doing wrong?
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