On Wed, Jul 19, 2023 at 8:50 AM Eric Altendorf <[email protected]>
wrote:
> I'm trying to understand how to construct legs for a transaction where no
> legs are in the operating currency. For example, one might exchange USDT
> (Tether) for BTC. USDT is sorta like USD but actually not, and its
> exchange rate does fluctuate. Such a transaction isn't technically just a
> purchase from the standpoint of US taxation; it rather is considered:
>
> 1) a virtual sale of the USDT for USD, for which capital gains may be owed
> 2) a virtual purchase of BTC with those USD proceeds, which establishes
> the cost basis for the BTC
>
FYI, I don't think we do crypto well in Beancount (yet). I mean, if it
works it's incidental, other than participation in threads and some design
notes for the future, its author never really sat down to solve those
issues.
I don't yet have a deep enough intuition on Beancount "cost" and "price" to
> understand whether this can be accomplished simply with two legs (a USDT
> leg and a BTC leg) with some "price" magic, or whether I need four legs
> (two additional USD legs).
>
> How would one record such a transaction?
>
Does this work well enough?
plugin "beancount.plugins.sellgains"
2022-01-01 open Equity:Opening-Balances
2022-01-01 open Assets:Coinbase:USDT USDT
2022-01-01 open Assets:Coinbase:BTC BTC
2022-01-01 open Income:Coinbase:Pnl USD
2022-06-01 * "Initial balances"
Assets:Coinbase:USDT 20000 USDT {1.0000 USD}
Assets:Coinbase:BTC 10 BTC {10000.00 USD}
Equity:Opening-Balances
2022-06-01 * "Your transaction"
Assets:Coinbase:USDT -10209.18 USDT {} @ 1.023 USD
Assets:Coinbase:BTC 1 BTC {10444 USD}
Income:Coinbase:Pnl
The thing is, the capital gains between the USDT and the BTC are mixed
together, maybe that's not great.
> (For bonus points, some exchanges charge transaction fees in other assets,
> e.g. USDT. In that case, the transaction fees are then also an implicit
> sale for USD, so I need to figure out how to enter that as well.)
>
> thanks,
> eric
>
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