RE: Being a Trailblazer Ain’t Easy
I seem to be the only one in Finland who is currently earning cryptocurrencies by blogging. There are of course other Finnish people in here, but to my knowledge, they haven't sold anything or traded, so I don't think they have had to deal with these issues related to taxation yet.
Cashing out has nothing to do with it. If you work for your STEEM, SBD and SP, then they are earned income ("muu ansiotulo") and they are become taxable income at the moment you gain possession of them. Theoretically, they are valued at the moment you gain possession of them but because there are so many events, it's unreasonable to expect anyone to check the price of each of the coin on Coinmarketcap (for instance) to determine what precisely they are worth in euros at the precise moment of gaining possession of them.
There is a handy tool to group your STEEM, SBD and SP income inluding both curation and author rewards on a monthly basis at: https://steemit.accusta.tk/
It says on the front page that you get them on a weekly basis, too, but I didn't find that functionality on it any longer. If you go to coinmarketcap.com, you can easily calculate the monthly average prices of STEEM and SBD. It is reasonably accurate to treat SP as equal to STEEM.
These are the best tools available that I know of for calculating the fiat value of your Steem income. The result will be close enough and the tax administration will not be able to calculate them any more precisely than that. You can always say that the day-to-day fluctuations in the price of STEEM and SBD are so large and random that a solution using averages like this is as good as it gets.
Oh, and if you have bought any votes (I know you have as you have used @ocdb), my personal opinion is that you can deduct what you have paid for the votes from your income because the quantitative relationship between a payment for a vote and the vote is quite straightforward and completely algorithmic. Theoretically, if you treat payments for votes as expenses deductible from your earned income, you might run into the problem of €750 deduced (tulonhankkimisvähennys) by default. But, IMO, this is nothing like buying a camera for a professional photographer, for instance. You pay @ocdb x and you get a certain predetermined percentage of the maximum upvote usually after less than 24 hours. Different thing.
There are some high-earning Steemians who have powered up everything despite the extremely high price of STEEM last spring and the prices cratering since. Those people have managed to rack up such a high tax bill that they will now face not reporting their Steem income at all or paying tens of thousands of $$$ or €€€ in taxes. It's actually a pretty horrible situation. I have no trouble paying what I have calculated I owe but I'm actually a bit worried about some other people.
It is not reasonable or fair to pay taxes for let’s say steem at 4€, if you sell it a year later at 0,4€. And according to one of the phone calls, it isn’t so, it is then counted as a loss at point, according to the new law. The tax pages say that it’s only when you trade or sell when the amount is counted into either as a gain or a loss, counting the difference for when you gained said coin, no matter how you got it to your possession. But further info is still needed. Thanks for the link, I’ll be definitely using it to keep track.
Let's say you have earned 10 STEEM on May 1 2018 and the price of STEEM is €4 on that day. Your earnings will be €40 that day. That is the sum you should pay earned income tax on.
Capital gains tax is something different altogether. If the value of that 10 STEEM drops to a tenth and you sell it, then you will not have to pay any capital gains tax on any gains because there are none. Instead, you can declare a loss. But if the price of STEEM were €5 when you sold your STEEM, you would have made (€5-€4)*10 = €10 in capital gains, which are taxed at 30% (if less than €30,000 in a tax year) or at 34% (otherwise).
So, if you were so lucky as to have your earned STEEM, SBD, SP appreciate after having gained in value during your possession of them, then you'd owe BOTH earned income tax on their value at gaining possession of them AND capital gains tax on the appreciation between gaining possession of them and selling them for fiat, exchanging them for other cryptos or goods or services.
Now, it could be that some official you've talked to does not understand how cryptos are supposed to be taxed in according to the guidelines published by the Tax Administration itself. In that case, you may count your blessings and hope that they will not get back to your case later, which I think they won't because they're busy with other stuff. :)
If you earn stocks as part of your salary, they are taxed similarly. Their value at the point you gain possession of them is considered taxable earned income and any realized appreciation is considered capital gains or any realized depreciation is considered a loss deductible from your capital gains. What corporations that pay a part of their employee's salaries in stocks or options or something like that do, is automatically liquidate a portion of the assets and withhold the money in order to pay the Tax Administration on the employer's behalf. Steem is nobody's employer. It's not even a legal person and has no such duties even if it were under our jurisdiction. Therefore, it is the responsibility of each Steemian themselves to see to it that they have the cash available to pay their taxes at the end of the tax year.
I do not believe and will refuse to pay taxes on money that is not even real and I can't buy anything with it. The moment they start accepting my steems at the supermarket, then I can pay taxes according to the price steem is at the moment I earn it. Otherwise it really is super unfair, especially so when they keep changing the laws all the time. It is written in our law, that we can trust the system to not change rules every which way when ever they want to, but everyone needs to be let know well in advance if something like that is happening. When I started, all I knew was that what ever is changes into euros, you pay taxes for that, which made sense, other than the fact that you couldn't count out the money you invested in originally.
Edit: Esim tossa aika hyvä blogipostaus aiheesta: https://www.konsensusry.fi/fi/blog/muista-tama-verohallinnon-2018-ohje-virtuaalivaluuttojen-verotukseen-ei-koske-verovuotta-2018-tai-sita-aikaisempia-verovuosia
awee hell thats not confusing at all...
It's not so difficult. Especially if you cash out as you earn, you'll just have to put enough aside to cover your tax obligations. The tool I gave a link to outputs a record of your earned STEEM, SBD and SP on a monthly (or weekly) basis, which makes it possible to track them accurately enough for tax purposes.