Wallets and addresses

Your history is the addresses you watch. A wallet is one or more addresses you keep under one name, and your tax is computed across all of your wallets and every network at once, as one report rather than one per wallet, because your coins do not stop being yours when they move between two of your own addresses.

Adding an address

Paste an address, or let a browser wallet name the ones it holds, and press Read. One address is read on every network it can exist on, from its first transaction to the last block that can no longer change.

An address added to a wallet that was already read still gets its own full history: nothing is skipped because its neighbours were read earlier.

Any address can be read, whoever else watches it. The networks are public and we read an address once for everybody, so typing one in asks us to read it and nothing more: there is nothing to sign and nothing to approve, and it takes nothing away from anybody else watching the same address. A signature from the address does one other thing, and the next section is about that.

A Bitcoin wallet by its key

A Bitcoin or Litecoin wallet can be given as the extended public key its software exports (it starts with xpub, ypub or zpub), instead of its addresses one at a time. We work out the addresses it holds, read them under it as one source, and count the key as one address of your plan however many it holds: a wallet of forty addresses is still one wallet.

Never give anybody a private key, and that includes us: we recognise one and refuse it. The key to give is the public one, which cannot spend.

Each later reading follows the wallet as it spends on: we look twenty unused addresses past the last one with a transaction, which is where wallet software stops looking too.

Saying an address is yours

Reading an address is one thing, and saying the address is yours is another. Whose it is matters in one place: the answer that coins you sent went to your own wallet. A move between two of your own addresses is not a sale and is not taxed, so we refuse that answer for an address another account signs in with, because otherwise anybody could make a sale look like a move of their own by naming a stranger's address. What you read is the address followed by is in another Taxinger account: sign in with that wallet to say it is yours. We do not say whose account it is.

Sign in with the address itself, and it is yours. A signature from the address is the only proof we accept, and it wins over anybody's typing the address in. Where the address is somebody's way into an account, signing with it puts you into that account, with everything already read there. Where it was only typed into somebody else's account, signing with it opens your own account instead (a new one, if that address has never signed in). Either way you are given nothing of the other account, and the other account keeps everything it had.

Bringing it together with the account you already use. Sign in to the account you want to keep, then add the address to it as a second way in. If that address opens another account, the two become one: its ways in, its wallets and addresses, its exchange accounts, its answers and notes, what was bought and what that has already counted, and any access an accountant was given all move across; its tax country and its language come over if yours has none, and the years are computed again. An account a passkey protects is not joined this way: sign in there instead. An email address joins two accounts in the same way, one signed in with and the other added.

If you no longer have the key, you can still watch the address and have its history read: that is open to everybody. What you cannot do is answer that the address is yours, and nothing here takes it out of the account that has it: a signature is the only proof we accept. Write to us at support@taxinger.com with the address. There is no button for it, and nothing moves on a claim alone.

Smart wallets found for you

Some addresses own a second wallet their owner never created by hand: the account a prediction market made for them. Where a wallet of that kind was made for an address you watch, it is found from your address and watched in the same wallet, unasked, because its transactions are yours.

The other direction is only offered: where a smart wallet you watch names an owner, that owner's address is shown as a question in your workspace, and you add it or decline it for good.

Reading again

Reading again is the same ask as the first time: each network continues from the block it stopped at, a network added since is read from its start, and the ask opens an hour after the last reading ended. A network Taxinger adds is announced, and it is read when you next ask: no reading starts on its own.

A place that is your business's

A wallet or an exchange account can be marked as your business's. The mark holds for that place's whole history, with no dates: everything it holds leaves your private report, with no lots, no disposals and no income of its own, and we tell you how many entries that is.

A move between a private place and a business one is listed for you, never computed: a contribution to a business and a withdrawal from it are outside what this report computes. A place used for both is to be split, and we say so.

Taking an address out

Any address can be taken back out: it leaves your history and your years are computed again. What was read of it is kept, so watching it again reads nothing twice and costs nothing (each transaction is paid for once, ever). Your own answers about that address go out with it.

How many addresses you may read is what a plan sets, and it counts every address you ever put on reading: taking one out frees no room for the next, because the reading was already done. See plans and what counts.