Long haul flights are never fun... however, the actual trip itself is not the worst of it. The dreaded jet-lag is, for me, the most terrible part. The part where you are wide awake in the middle of the night and deadly exhausted in the middle of the day. It is even worse when you have little kids who just keep falling asleep in the middle of the day out of sheer exhaustion!

Anyway, what I have found is that the jet-lag is best combatted by forcing yourself into the correct time zone with eating and sleeping habits. Of course, if you can start to do that whilst in flight that does make things quite a bit easier.... but who can do that, with all the movies that are begging to be watched?

So, today was the first full day in Australia for our little family. We all tried our best to keep ourselves occupied with various little tasks that needed doing. The little one needed to test out her new scooter, the oldest needed to build some models and her Sylvannia families house... my wife needed to unpack and store the clothes, and I needed to set up the electrical stuff...

...well, the electrical stuff was less important than the setting up of the desktop computer... in order to tackle the highly exciting task of porting over the crypto accounting from the Netherland to Australia in Cointracking. Now, I have mentioned before that the tax accounting of crypto in Netherlands is really simple, it is just a single snapshot at tax time (turn of the year)... and so, I have been pretty slack with the entering of accounting in Cointracking. Basically, I only ever needed to know the totals, and Cointracking would just handle the pricing at the actual time that I needed the snapshot to be taken. I didn't need to take into account any trades or drops or cost basis or anything annoying like that... It was tax reporting heaven!

However, on our return to Australia... all of our assets (including the digital ones) become part of the Australian taxation ruleset. And for crypto, that is the Capital Gains ruleset... which is pretty poop to keep track of. It means that you need to keep track of all trades, and the cost basis at which you acquired each token... Thankfully, all of our crypto transferred at the time of touchdown in Australia... with all the cost basis being calculated at that instant of time.

In Cointracking, it wasn't possible to change the way that I had previously accounted for our crypto. I had just listed everything as a simple deposit... however, that didn't have any cost basis and couldn't easily be changed to a different format. So, I fired up a new account, linked it to the same Cointracking plan (you can link up to 10 accounts with the same paid plan!) and started manually importing everything...

... needless to say, it is pretty damn tedious work. But I needed a snapshot start for cost basis at touchdown in Australia. There wasn't any other way to automate it easily.

However, once the starting snapshot was taken, the automation of trade and tracking could be started. I will have to monitor it a bit to see if it goes too far out or needs some gentle guidance. I've noticed that some of the blockchain transaction automation can be a bit strange! It isn't the fault of Cointracking, as there is a million and one things being developed every single day across multiple blockchains.

In the end, I'm not sure if it will be perfect... but I am doing my best to keep with the tracking of everything for tax purposes. I'm hopeful that if I do get audited, the auditor will have seen that I've done my best to try and track everything in such a rapidly changing and developing ecosystem with inconsistent and unclear tax guidance!

... and if you were wondering, nope... doing crypto tax accounting wasn't riveting enough to keep me awake... it is a necessary evil, and something that is best set up immediately whilst I have nothing better to do than just keep awake. Otherwise, when life starts to take over... I can see that this would get completely out of hand and then be a huge stress out when tax time comes around!

I would advise others to play on the safe side with crypto accounting... it is also a good way to track your portfolio as well, I do find that Cointracking is my preferred tracking software, it does produce some really nice tax reports and also some pretty useful visualisations and data from the information that you provide it, and it does pretty well with most exchanges and blockchains. Plus, it has an active development team behind it that is racing to keep up with all the newest fads out there! Remember, unless you are a cyber-ninja that will NEVER slip up and make a mistake with your IRL identity and your digital one, you will likely be linked at some point... so, better to play it safe... plus, if you have made tidy profits, it doesn't hurt to pay up to make sure that you don't get into some serious future troubles (PS: I'm not going to debate the merits/rights of taxation... if you have strong ideas about that, let's just say you win and save ourselves any angst!).

I can also be found cross-posting at:
Hive
Steem
Publish0x

Handy Crypto Tools

Ledger Nano S/X: Keep your crypto safe and offline with the leading hardware wallet provider. Not your keys, not your crypto!
Binance: My first choice of centralised exchange, featuring a wide variety of crypto and savings products.
Kucoin: My second choice in exchanges, many tokens listed here that you can't get on Binance!
FTX: Regulated US-based exchange with some pretty interesting and useful discounts on trading and withdrawal fees for FTT holders. Decent fiat on-ramp as well!
MXC: Listings of lots of interesting tokens that are usually only available on DEXs. Avoid high gas prices!
Huobi: One of the largest exchanges in the world, some very interesting listings and early access sales through Primelist.
Gate.io: If you are after some of the weirdest and strangest tokens, this is one of the easiest off-chain places to get them!
Coinbase: If you need a regulated and safe environment to trade, this is the first exchange for most newcomers!
Crypto.com: Mixed feelings, but they have the BEST looking VISA debit card in existence! Seriously, it is beautiful!
CoinList: Access to early investor and crowdsale of vetted and reserached projects.
Cointracking: Automated or manual tracking of crypto for accounting and taxation reports.
Stoic: A USD maximisation bot trading on Binance using long-term long strategies, powered by the AI/human system of Cindicator.
StakeDAO: Decentralised pooled staking of PoS assets.
Poloniex: One of the older regulated exchanges that has come into new ownership. I used to use it quite a lot, but have since stopped.
Bitfinex: Ahhh... another oldie, but a goodie exchange. Most noted for the close affiliation with USDT and the Basic "no-KYC" tier!