Accounting for Cryptocurrency Mining Operations

[Adrien Monteleone]

From what I read last night, the basic idea is to estimate the mineral value from the purchase if it wasn’t stated explicitly. When purchasing a property for the purpose of mineral extraction, the estimated lode value is listed in the sale documents. You’re making two purchases - one for the land, one for the mineral rights based on lode value.

Then you add to the expected mineral value, your inputs - equipment, labor, operations cost, etc.

There is then a depletion entry based on how much is estimated to have been extracted. (similar to a depreciation entry)

When you sell the metal, you realize the profit over this final book value.

If you paid some of your employees or yourself in gold as part of the extraction, you’d likely book it at current market value in local currency as ‘personal income’ or whatever your local tax laws require.

bitcoin doesn’t come from a pre-existing territory or physical asset that is purchased with a ‘ore’ value known in advance or even estimated. That leaves inputs for mining. Unless one can come up with a reasonable estimate or accounting for those inputs (if they aren’t practically nil anyway) then the full market value at award point would likely be booked against income.

The terrible part about that is you’d have to pay tax on something you haven’t actually realized yet because bitcoin only has a particular value in an actual transaction. It has no value at creation.(if I understand how it works correctly) So then you have the mess of booking 12.5 bitcoin against zero value, then ‘spending’ some of those bitcoins at a particular value.


Regards,
Adrien

> On Oct 26, 2017, at 6:19 AM, Jean-David Beyer <jeandavid8 at verizon.net> wrote:
> 
> On 10/26/2017 12:21 AM, Rodney Elliott wrote:
>> Hi All.
>> 
>> 
>> If I were to purchase a cryptocurrency (say Bitcoin) with a fiat
>> currency recognised by gnucash (say USD), then the procedure to
>> record the transaction is clear - create an asset account of the type
>> 'stock', associate it with a new security that uses the coin ticker
>> (BTC) and the maximum number of significant figures supported by
>> gnucash, etc.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> What to do in the case of mining a cryptocurrency is less clear. The
>> BTC asset account would need to be credited with the amount of coins
>> mined, but then what? How do you balance this transaction, given that
>> no fiat currency was involved? The cryptocurrency was effectively
>> created out of thin air. I feel like the answer is an equity account
>> of some description, but I do not think that it would be appropriate
>> to have an equity account of the type 'stock'. Is there a tractable
>> solution to this problem?
>> 
> 
> If you found gold on your property and worked as a gold miner, and took
> the gold as payment for your labors, how would you account for that?
> Maybe it is just income paid in that alternate currency; gold in the
> case of gold mining, BTC in the case of bitcoin. ???
> 
> 
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