No cost basis left: how Austria taxes bitcoin gains
Old exchanges shut down, CSV files lost, or bitcoin moved to a hardware wallet years ago: among long-standing crypto investors in particular, the original acquisition costs are often missing by the time a sale comes around.
In Austria that does not mean the gain is automatically tax free. Quite the opposite. Where an Austrian crypto service provider obliged to withhold tax cannot use the actual tax data, the law provides for a flat-rate assumption of the acquisition costs for the purposes of that deduction. At the same time, this does not settle the tax question once and for all.
Which cost basis data does the crypto exchange need?
To withhold capital gains tax correctly, the Austrian provider has to know the acquisition data that is relevant for tax.
That mainly covers:
- the acquisition date or acquisition period,
- the actual acquisit...
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