The Thursday Recap #12

Happy New Year to all! In our first Recap of 2020 find out what we plan to implement this month ahead of the tax deadline - did someone say new exchanges!? We also take a look at the latest headlines but first up...

Proof of Keys - Not your keys; Not your Bitcoin

The annual Proof of Keys celebration takes place tomorrow – 3rd January. The Bitcoin community HODLers of Last Resort participate by demanding and taking possession of all bitcoins held by trusted third parties on their behalf. One of the main goals of the event is to make sure that exchanges have the funds that they claim to have. After all, if they don’t, then there’s no guarantee that you actually own the coins you purchased on the exchange.

YouTube Crypto Crackdown - is there a need for an alternative decentralized platform?

YouTube started flagging and removing cryptocurrency-related videos on the platform just before Christmas suggesting that the videos were propagating “harmful or dangerous content” and the “sale of regulated goods.” Popular YouTube channels Chico Crypto & BTC Sessions were among those affected, as well as ChrisDunnTV who has been active for nearly a decade and has 200k+ subscribers. Many of the videos were purely educational and contained no investment advice or advertising and some had gathered hundreds of thousands of views. With reports of a group organised attack and YouTube having yet to comment, it’s likely to remain unclear why and who they were removed by.

The videos started to be quietly restored by YouTube as early as 26th December, with creators stating that warnings and penalties imposed had been removed but it has sparked debate for the need of a decentralized alternative across the crypto community. Some are positive about the prospects of a decentralised video sharing platform, notably Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao who tweeted that it will further accelerate the progress of decentralised file systems. Others argue that the average YouTuber is there to make money and not to share content or encourage adoption.

Twitter Bug Exposes Millions of User Phone Numbers

Over a two month period security researcher, Ibrahim Balic matched 17 million records from users by exploiting a flaw in Twitter’s Android app. He created randomised lists of phone numbers and sent them to Twitter. “If you upload your phone number, it fetches user data in return,” he said. This data allowed Balic to find phone numbers for many major Twitter "celebrities" including the private number of a "senior Israeli politician."

There have been many security lapses involving Twitter in 2019; sharing location data with a partner; giving ad partners more data than they should have and using phone numbers provided for two-factor authentication for serving targeted ads. This latest privacy breach - essentially connecting real numbers to real Twitter handles - almost questions the reliability of two-factor authentication schemes popular on financial applications and wallets.

Our Plans for January

Exchanges

We're currently prioritizing the following integrations:

• Bitfinex
• BitMEX
• Poloniex
• Bittrex
• BitPanda

We expect to complete most of these before the end of January. If you'd like to suggest other exchanges for the short term, get in touch.

Tax Changes

• New tax years page - We'll soon be adding a new tax year page, where you can see at a glance your taxable gains or losses for each of your tax years and navigate to the tax summary pages.

• Foreign currency support - Recap doesn't currently support tracking of foreign currency positions. When we add this feature, foreign currency will be treated as another assets as per the CGT Capital Gains Manual. With this will be added the ability to specify the valuation amount for fiat deposits and withdrawals, allowing the modelling of implicit foreign exchanges. For example, if you sent GBP from your personal bank account to an exchange and it was deposited as EUR, Recap will value the deposited EUR as the GBP amount rather than using the prevailing rate, potentially reducing your gains where your bank or exchange has given you a less than favourable exchange rate.

• Gifts to spouses - You'll soon be able to flag a gift to a spouse. This will be a no gain/loss disposal and the cost basis that your spouse should use for their acquisition will be added to the tax reports.

• Pricing method - We'll soon be adding the ability to change the pricing method used for valuing transactions. Recap currently uses the daily close price, but you'll soon also be able to use the open, high, low or average prices, potentially reducing your gains (though you should pick one and stick with it across tax years for consistency).

US Tax Support

We're planning to add support for US/IRS tax rules well ahead of the 2019 filing deadline on April 15th. Along with this will come integrations with some more US focused exchanges, such as Gemini, Uphold and Binance.US.