When Canadians ask us about where they should buy Bitcoin, we refer them to ShakePay. The bonus for signing up with a referral code, is you get access their #ShakingSats program. It’s a mechanism within ShakePay that lets you log into the app once per day, and shake your phone for free Bitcoin. Now that we are firmly inside of Canadian tax season, we must now answer the question. Do you have to pay taxes on your #ShakingSats reward?

Do you Pay Taxes on #ShakingSats

The way I see it, you do.

It’s income. Anytime you receive Bitcoin, it needs to be claimed as income. The reason why you need to claim it as income, is so when (or if) you decide to sell it later for CAD or trade it for another cryptocurrency, you can update your average cost basis.

ACB - The Average Cost of Acquisition for a piece of property, capital, or asset

When you report your capital gains or losses to the government of Canada, you must use the Average Cost Basis method for calculating your capital gains. Bitcoin you receive for free, lowers your cost basis, because you are receiving it for free.

Calculating My Income and Gains

ShakePay has a handy feature that allows you to export your entire transaction history from the app. This includes each and every time you earn a few Satoshis from #ShakingSats. You can reach the export menu by clicking the gear in the bottom right hand corner, and selecting “Request Transaction Summary” from the menu. Your transaction history will be sent to the email address that you use to sign up on ShakePay.

With a Spreadsheet

You have a couple of options for calculating your #ShakingSats income. You can import that .csv file into a spreadsheet application like Google Sheets. This works great if you have a relatively simple transaction history with ShakePay.

With Koinly

If you’ve used ShakePay to trade, and have a multitude of transactions, then you may want to consider using an automated reporting software like Koinly. In my case, I use Koinly because I shake everyday, buy Bitcoin multiple times per month, and occasionally sell back into Canadian dollars to pay some bills. I have thousands of transactions in my ShakePay transaction history and this is simply too big of a job to do manually. You can write excel formulas to calculate everything for you, but at the end of the day, I’m already using Koinly for the rest of my crypto taxes.

New to Bitcoin?

The first cryptocurrency I ever bought was Dogecoin back in 2015. I didn’t know what I was doing - and I love dogs, so dogecoin caught my attention. I have a come a very long way since 2015 - from paying off 60k worth of student debt to converting my company’s cash reserves into Bitcoin. What I lacked was the tools and a strategy to maximize my financial plan. Avoid making the mistakes I made and maximize your wealth potential. Work with us.